I am keeping nocturnal hours lately, like the bush babies and fruit bats and the two-toed sloth in the Night Exhibit at Woodland Park Zoo, still one of my favorite places in the world to visit. Well, my world. For all my distress over US politics, I’ve never left the North American continent, except for one visit to Hawaii when I was 19. And I like it here–that is, I like the American West for its geography and I like the urban American West for its culture. You know: cities, where most Americans live.
But so my November 1 just started about an hour ago. It is also Monday: I took the last two “days” off because.. well, because working for other people wears me out so much that I find it necessary to take frequent breaks. If I were independently wealthy, I would stay in my room and write all the time, but since I need rent money and other sorts of money, I have to find ways to convince other people to give me their money, by offering them services of various sorts, since my only domestic products are the things I write, an occasional drawing, or an even more occasional piece of music, none of which have netted me an appreciable amount in sales over the course of my life.
Thus I am starting National Blog Posting Month a few hours behind most others on the continent, I imagine, although writers are known for keeping strange hours. Writing a blog post every day is going to take a fair amount of creativity, especially since I am used to blogging about once a month and so am but a faint and flickering blip in a remote corner of the blogosphere. I am hoping that having to come up with something vaguely interesting every day will help to loosen the internal censor who tells me every day why I should not write on this or that topic.
So the theme of the month for me will be Screw It I’m Going to Write Whatever I Want to Write and If People Don’t Like it They Can Take a Walk. Or something like that. In my head the title is filled with profanity because I curse like a drunken frat boy although I am not nearly as obnoxious as one; but I thought that for now I would clean it up. We shall see if I am cursing by the end of the month.
I have been unnecessarily shy about posting here because not only do I feel like every post has to pivot around some sort of Topic rather than resembling my diary-like entries at LiveJournal. I make mostly public posts there but rarely are they focused on anything in particular other than Here Is What I Did Today, which is not what I want to do with my blog, exactly, although there is always an element of that in the Here Is What I’m Thinking About Today or Here Is Something I Made Today approach I take towards my “real blog.” But the other thing that keeps me from posting here is the fact that I do not like arguments but I do of course hold controversial positions on various issues just like anybody else does. And so I am going to take the plunge into a conversation that may or may not even go anywhere, much less anywhere heated and contentious, but should any argument arise here, chances are I will not follow it to whatever a logical conclusion of an argument might be.
So there may be times when I simply stop replying to comments. This is a tactic of self-preservation (although yes the concept of the “self” is problematic for me but for now I will just go with the colloquial meaning to stand in for something like “emotional and mental shelter,” which itself will probably be expanded upon when I write about psychological disabilities, which I am fairly certain I will); try not to take it personally as either defeat or triumph when I do not answer. It may simply be that I need to disengage from a conversation that has turned into a shrieking chorus of hellfire and brimstone preachers in my head. Because this happens to me, you see.
Otherwise, the only rule I follow here is to make it vaguely coherent. Sometimes I post pictures and sometimes I post odd bits of proetry which is a word for the cross between poetry and prose that I am fond of stringing out on a regular basis. It may not be the word I stick with but I will use it here as another make-do term. I hope that, by the end of the month, I will have more than the five readers I think I have now. There may be some research on finding an audience and hosting my own blog and even placing advertising and/or a tip jar since fuck it (see?) I live in a capitalist culture and I need money as badly as any other writer, which is pretty darned badly.
I suppose that is enough for Opening Day? I am sure the topic of the National Election in the US has been covered in great depth by others although I might write between now and then a little about why I do not pay attention to the news anymore, especially before crucial elections. I get my information in other ways, which I think is probably for the better, given that the national media do not really provide much in terms of actual information anyway. But so later for that.
The first day of classes when I teach is the day when I want to blurt to the gathered flock in each classroom Please don’t kill me! They haven’t yet. I hope I survive this as well.
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