Mile Post 100

It's hard to believe, but this is my 100th blog entry. To commemorate the event, I'm posting an entry from my personal journal. It's a glimpse of how this all got started. But before I do that, I want to say "Thanks" to Suzanne of "At Home with the Farmer's Wife" for providing the creative spark. Each life touching so many others. It really is a wonderful life.

It's Sunday: July 5th, 2009 - 10:25 PM

I had my first exposure to the blogosphere today. What a strange world we live in. Millions? of writers working tirelessly to produce material read by a total of ten or twenty people ... and all for free? The internet continues to redefine the world as we know it. The newspaper industry is collapsing: everyone gets news from the internet and no one wants to pay. Has the reporter gone the way of the buggy whip maker?

I went "online" to search for Zen Macrobiotics; but before I ran that search, I remembered someone at the hotel saying I showed some signs of Asperger's Syndrome. I ran a search for "Asburgers Symdrome" (Yeah, that's how I spelled it ... Symdrome) on Yahoo, and the top search result was a blog called "At Home with the Farmer's Wife". It had nothing to do with Asperger's, but it did have a lot of cool homesteading stuff; and lot's of links to other blogs with cool homesteading kind of stuff ... and ... well ... it just goes on & on forever. Not really forever in a literal sense, but forever in a personal sense for sure. Millions of people writing blog entries every day - from "Alfredo is hungry this morning" to a discourse on how following the creek by your house can take you anywhere you want to go. The former a sad commentary as to what a writer thinks his readers will find of value; the latter a provoking narrative of the interconnectedness of life strangely reminiscent of that book about the little wooden canoe - "Paddles to the Sea".

The internet is like an uncontrollable thought that constantly leads somewhere else ... and burns up life/hours as if they were free. I never got around to searching for ... what was it? ... oh yeah ... I remember now ... Zen Macrobiotics. It's become damn near impossible to control the content. I found a discussion on one blog about raising chickens, and another discussion on another blog about whether blogging and writing a journal are one and the same. For some people "Yes", for others "No". Those who do both, fell into both camps - some used the different media for different purposes, others found themselves duplicating their entries in both media. I have to envy them and all their spare time. How can anyone have enough time to do both? I can barely find enough time to jot a few thoughts in here. I can't imagine having time to keep a blog ... or anyone else wasting time reading the entries.

How did all this come about? Where is it all leading? Where is the shared experience that makes us a nation? We just seem to get more & more fragmented: a whole nation of individuals. If I write a blog about working at a hotel and repairing trolleys and being a Realtor and fixing cars and gardening and fishing and building model railroads and doing all the other things I love like painting and writing and taking pictures and playing in the band and reading good books (but not fiction) ... would anybody care but me?

I've tried putting up a website but I don't have time to answer e-mails let alone develop web content that would really matter. And yet, there is a strange attraction to the vicarious aspect of a blog. Vanity, egotism ... I'm trying to remember the word that describes someone who considers his own insignificant life so important that others would want to know that "Alfredo is hungry this morning", but the word escapes me ... and Sharon ... and a dictionary ... and two thesauruses. Maybe I should just go run a search on the internet. If I could only stay focused long enough to find the word, I could write it here for no one to read. Sad really, very sad.

... And that is how Scarred Bark began!