to blog or not to blog...

"Leaving wits the spacious air

With license to build castles there"

~Jonathan Swift

To blog or not to blog.  That was my question.  It's something I've been thinking about for months, always in the back of my head, lingering somewhere in my perpetually endless to-do list, right between "clean the bathroom" and "plant an herb garden".  I remember telling a friend, a while ago, that I was thinking of starting a blog.  He informed me that the purpose of a blog is to educate, to incite discussion.  What then, I wondered, could any blog of mine offer?  I must admit I feel thoroughly unqualified to write revolutionary political commentary or to report insightfully on current events.  So what then, could I write that would be of value?  What would my blog be about?  And, more importantly, exactly what the fuck was a blog anyhow?

These questions, for the most part, have yet to be answered.  But it seems I have finally decided that I will indeed attempt to answer them.  And that answer, or the quest for it, will be a journey I think, hopefully a gradual discovery of purpose as this blog progresses and grows.  Much like life itself, no?  But the impetus of my blog is this:  I have these thoughts, like most people I assume, random thoughts that travel through my head like cars at a busy intersection.  And sometimes, if I let the thought go, if I sit idly by and watch it rush through onto its next destination without flagging it down for a ride, it is gone, perhaps forever, doomed to become the ghost of a musing, to linger on in the purgatory of lost and forgotten thoughts and dreams.

There have been times, mostly during few and infrequent periods of being high, that I could swear I had grasped some sacred, unknown truth, or remembered some crucial, long-forgotten moment from childhood that held the secret to my entire existence, held my fingers out to touch the very meaning of life itself.  These no doubt were fanciful illusions; the effects of over-intoxication on my low-tolerance brain.  But still I can't help but think:  how marvelous if I could happen to capture one of these moments?  What if I could record and remember such a conversation with myself, instead of it persisting as a vague, nagging recollection of something interesting and potentially important that will forever remain a mystery?  Well, ok, maybe it wouldn't be so spectacular, they would likely read as the drug-addled rantings of a lunatic... but perhaps interesting, or at least mildly amusing.

Anyway, I digress.  These "moments of higher consciousness"(hah) are not the point of this blog.  The real point, I suppose, is to give some of my thoughts a chance to come forth, to speak for themselves.  To record my everyday contemplations, on life love, happiness... whatever random argument or epiphany may happen to visit me that I don't want to let go, that I want to lasso in and hug close and invite to tea to mull things over with.  To capture moments, the feeling of a fleeting glimpse of existence that, like a falling star, streaks across the consciousness only once in a lifetime:  many will follow similarly, but never in quite the same way.  And so these I call my "castles in the sky",  my snippets of insight or delusion, random musings and day dreams that take root and see fit to build themselves a palace in the celestial spaces of my mind.

The truth is that I don't really expect anyone to read this.  I decided to keep this blog for myself, as a kind of personal record or archive for the ramblings of my ever-wandering mind.  But, if you somehow should find yourself here, reading these words, please do make yourself at home.  Take off your coat.  Sit and stay a while.  Welcome to the random and sometimes wacky world of my head.  I must apologize in advance for the mess, for my frequent long-windedness (it comes naturally when writing) and occasional self-indulgence (hey, it's my party, I can cry if I want to, right?).  I hope that if you do happen to stumble upon this blog and somehow feel, whether out of interest or boredom, compelled to linger, that you won't be terribly bored or confused.  I hope that you may find here a smile, a laugh, perhaps a nod of the head.  Maybe you won't leave particularly edified or incited to discussion,  But maybe, just maybe, you will leave contemplative, inspired, or thinking about something in a new way.

**photo by Ken Parry**