When I first began this blog, my idea for it was that it would be a place to throw my voice into the fray. The increasingly crowded blogosphere. A place where whatever I felt, thought, my opinions about things: I could post. It’s my place. Many of my friends and family do not agree with my views, but that’s okay. Because of the blog, I do not feel as isolated or alienated as I might have otherwise.
There were other things I wanted to express on this blog.
I keep copious files on every country on the planet. Who knows why … but I do. Some countries, clearly, hold more interest to me than others, so their “files” are larger. Afghanistan (my fascination with that country WAY pre-dates Sept. 11), Georgia, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan … the Balkans. Any country in Central Asia. The Middle Eastern countries. Particularly Iran. I don’t know what I plan on DOING with these files, unless the CIA knocks on my door randomly one day and says, “Ma’am, we have heard about your files, and we need to know what you know about Kyrgyzstan.”
The scary thing is that I could answer them. Immediately.
“Kyrgyzstan is a small mountainous country squashed in between China and Kazakhstan … The whole country is mountains. Huge mountains. We’re talking the Tien Shan, okay?? Bring your hiking boots and oxygen tent, boys.”
I decided to use this blog as a forum for my obsessive knowledge about certain countries. Hence, my whole “Focus On” series (see the left nav).
I have stopped working on that series lately. Pretty much starting with the war in Iraq. I just don’t feel like “focusing on” anywhere else right now. I will get hyped up again about it, I am sure … but for now: my eyes are turned permanently towards Iraq, and it seems kind of meaningless to write a series of essays about the history of Albania. I don’t know. It just seems … meaningless. Not that I don’t care about Albania, I do. But the interest for me is not in that arena anymore.
So this morning I had an idea:
I’m a writer. I don’t just respond to the world. I try to describe it.
I keep copious journals. Or at least: I have in the past. My journals from high school and college are portraits of obsessive over-description. My friends wonder how I have such a fantastic memory, and can recall to them conversations we had 10 years ago. I don’t have a good memory. I just write everything down. Somehow, that engraves the memory in stone in my brain.
I rarely read over what I write. It’s not good to live in the past. I use them as a reference point, occasionally. If one of my friends say, “So … what year did we do The Rimers of Eldritch in college?”, I can look it up and tell them. I can tell my girlfriends who they were dating and at what time in their lives. “No, no, no, the year of that huge blizzard was the time you were dating that Xerox repair guy.”
My friend Mitchell calls me “the Homer” of our group of friends. The chronicler. The memory.
So now, I am going to incorporate this into my blog: diary entries throughout my life. I will leap about in chronology. I will pick stuff out at random, things I want to share, or things I think are funny, interesting, well-written. The journals are a gold-mine, I am telling you. Posting journal entries will be a big help to me at this moment in my life: I am working on a lot of different writing projects (fiction, non-fiction), and there are stuff in these journals which can spark me on, keep me going, remind me of funny/sad/thought-provoking details from my past. Bad writing is GENERAL writing. “God is in the details”. This is true. I want to post entries from my journals for this reason, but I also want to do it for those of you out there who enjoy my more personal posts, the ones about my life, my experiences, whatever.
Some people come to me for the politics, the conservative outlook. I will not give that up.
The blog will contain both.
I am thinking of having Friday be “DIARY DAY”. Start out the day with some entry from my journals, journals I have been keeping since I was fourteen years old.
If this is self-absorbed, so be it. The whole idea of a blog is self-absorbed!
But to get these words OUT, to put these things out into the world … This is part of joining the fray. This is what I am all about.
