The Idea of Blogging at Key West

Besides for being a basatardization of a great American poem (I'm tired of hyperbole - it's not the greatest, or even one of the greatest American poems - although there as a time when I'd have called it that), and a great idea (I really would love to be blogging in Key West right now, instead of in this frigid city), I thought it would be a nice idea to think about the idea of blogging.

I mostly started actually posting on this blog to give myself another chance to talk about myself. I mean, now, when the subject comes to the Internet, or when people talk about blogs, or when there's a lull in the conversation in general, I can say "oh I have a blog" "I talked about that on my blog" or "did you know I have a blog?" And then I can make a humorous comment about how even though the blog is called bezalela, it should be pronounced bezalel a, being my first name, bezalel, and my middle name, a, and I am not confused about my gender. Then we (meaning me and those I am talking to) lapse back into awkward silence.

But then I was thinking about it. I started writing on the blog because I thought it would make me write more in general. Besides for the year and a half burst when I was writing and revising my novel, and ocassional spurts of poetry, fiction, and criticism, I haven't been able to write consistently for very long about a single thing. I thought maybe if I forced myself to write a blog that would be half serious but mostly humorous, rhetorical, or pop-philosophical (how can something be half something but mostly something else? Figure that out...) then I would be able to sit down and write other things daily as well.

But, as I soon realized, writing the blog daily wasn't going to happen either. Writing the blog became similar to the way I write in general (except I don't edit the blog; I like the stream of consciousness effect of it, and I like laughing at the stupid spelling and gramatical mistakes I made when I read it over - which I do every couple of days). By that, I mean I write my blog sometimes once a week, sometimes more than once, sometimes less. There's no rhyme or reason to it. And while I like to think the writing I spend more time on (i.e. not this) is better than this, that might not be the case. I see me in both, which is weird. How can you see yourself in writing, anyway? It's just a bunch of letters. Script, that means nothing. Except you put it together, and it means something. It's a mystery, I guess.

This isn't, as I'm sure my 3 readers (who are astute and intelligent people, which is why they read this blog) have guessed, a goodbye to blogging. I'm not going to say, the experiment failed, so now I'll give it up. The experiment did fail, but I realized that I don't really care. While I like getting paid for my writing, and I like writing fiction and poetry that I hope one day I'll get paid for, I realized writing this blog that I also like spewing my thoughts, knowing (hoping, damnit, I'll be honest and say hoping) that anyone in the world can read them and then maybe they'll understand a little kernel of the world a little better, or at least think about something, or at least smile. It isn't fiction (well, most of it isn't), and I'm not getting paid for it. But it's still fun.