Welcome to my web, my capturing device, my frayed asterisk at the corner. Not complete but drawing your attention, marking out a space. It is violent, strategic, and imprisoning. It is beautiful, vulnerable, and strong.
I connect you to the words that connect you to yourself.
But do I have to write a blog?
Some words feature their ugly with a sound and mouth feel that lingers after the word is gone (sludge, gusset, fetid, moist). Like acid colors and triangle patterns in nature, they warn you to stay away.
Others engage the sickly boniness of their aristocratic inbreeding (pulchritude, bucolic, effulgence) to simply scare you off & save them from doing work. And some are linguistic carrion flowers that lure you in with their liquid sibilance before springing their deadly denotations (acquiesce, hirsute, silverfish).
But a word like blog doesn’t threaten or disdain or tease. It doesn’t do anything but sit, like a tepid lump of beige (not even griege)—unformed, flabby, & tired.
Blog is the sole-surviving syllable of a shantytown portmanteau: weblog. Blog has survivor’s guilt. It’s a purposely ugly word, blog. There has to be something better.
So today, and probably tomorrow, I will explore other words to denote and connote this weblog of musings, missives, and meanderings. This confluence of ephemera, this commonplace, this capturing device.
The one with the coffee & the Jesus
My two-day work week, like posting on Wednesdays, is an ideal, a goal, a good idea. But I don’t actually do it; I just say I do.
I'm going on a cold turkey techcation
Google “digital detox”, “phone diet”, or “technology break” and you will get millions of hits (but if you search for techcation, you won’t get anyone using the word the way I am). I have a few different approaches to weaning myself from technology bookmarked but really the only approach to anything that has ever worked for me is cold turkey.
There is no box
Boundaries create a safe space that I expand and fill and, in doing so, I re-outline the space I take up in the world.
Steeling Home
We will have vacations and baseball and ice cream this summer, but in light of my theme, these events are not just lowkey entertainment; they are in the service of strengthening everything that makes me feel safe: my body, my family, and my writing (my Work). My summer of Steeling Home has a subtitle: reinforce our foundations and balance our additions. Let’s remember who we are, accept the new parts of us, and make it all work together.
We have the technology
My secret subtitle for this blog is “Crouching Tiger, Kicking Asser” which perhaps over-states my confidence going into Tuesday. Of course, I am nervous about the surgery and, if I had my druthers, I would prefer not to go through it.
I open at the close
Harry Potter’s “snitch” couldn’t tell him anything until he was ready to hear it.
Now that I, like Hamlet, have been released from the responsibility of studies, and can manage my own sleeping and waking times for the summer, I may allow myself to follow a practice of segmented sleep.