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.
A pound of flesh
If an employer wants me to travel to their office and sit in their chair and drink their Kool-Aid, I am going to charge a premium for that service.
May Day (mayday)
A few years ago, I discovered that calling “mayday” is not a cry of distress unless you say it three times. In 2024, I am calling it out only twice. Does that mean I don’t need help? No, I can always use a bit of help. It just means that I don’t feel help-less. I might even feel help-ful.
Give me a sign!
If everything around me is an answer--which it is--then I need to consider the questions I am asking. And rather than attempting to read the whole world as augury, I need to learn to accept the obvious answers: the anomalies, the repetitions, the clovers.
1,440 Minutes (less 60)
So, now that you see them, what will you do with your 4 minutes each day? Can you intentionally spend 4 minutes every day on something that you wanted to do last year but could not fit into your everyday?
The Coffee Shoulds
Now that I have this pile of should in front of me, I need to start shoveling.
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.