Wait, why the hell am I here again?
This is actually a question you may be asking yourself and one that I ask myself frequently, except when I say it it typically comes out as, “What the hell am I doing here and how the hell did I get here???” In this instance there couldn’t be a more appropriate question, applying to both the current minute and this “place” that we have found ourselves in life. I’m going to try to provide a bit of an answer, for the current minute answer I provide some background here that might shed some light for one or, hopefully, both of us, for the bigger question, well, to a large extent that’s what this whole wonderful thing is about…
Well I guess this is the start of how I got here…
I have lots of ideas for, what I think are great, creative projects and I start a few of them and finish almost none of them. So I think this particular endeavor, being the BLAWWWWG you’ve currently landed on…
…was planted as a seed around the start of the COVID 19 pandemic (I’m writing this like it’s some historic event in our past while I’m also hoping that at some point in the future it will be some historic event in our past), when I listened to an episode of Kathy Heller’s Don’t Keep Your Day Job podcast with Neil Pasricha in which he talked about how his blog, 1000 Awesome Things, became his therapy to battle against his recent loss of a friend to suicide, and the ending of his marriage. Cut to the sprouting of that seed some months later when I found myself watching Bruce Springsteen on Broadway late at night, after having a few drinks, and I ended up drawing a picture of a tree from my childhood. Then I wrote about that tree and thought, maybe I should post this on the Facebook, and then I thought, wait a minute, this is the exact kind of thing I would put on my BLAWWWWG.
…but what does it all mean…
So now that I had some content I said, well shit, maybe this is a creative thing that I start, and then actually follow through with. What a novel idea. So it started to take shape, slowly, but really didn’t have a purpose. So thinking about that tree I started to appreciate that there are these things from my past that jump in to my head from time to time. Sometimes they’re nudged by people, like Bruce Springsteen, and other times they stand alone in a way that I would describe as sort of firework moments. When you see a firework burst in the sky and then go away sometimes the imprint of that thing still exists in your eyeballs, it stays with you for a bit. These moments are like that, times when there is an image, or a place, or an interaction, or a smell that just sticks, and you’re not entirely sure why, but it’s always there, seemingly clear as when it first happened. When I looked back at some of those moments I realized, wow, there’s a lot to unpack here and in almost all instances there was something that resonated and evidence that I still had a lot to learn. So I had the idea to start writing them down, for myself, for my kids, for anyone that might be willing and able to read about it and take something away from it for themselves. An experiment to take a look back in order to move forward a better, or more whole, or at least more aware, person.
Also, to be honest, I would love to explore a world in which I am living creatively and doing what I’ve always wanted to do.
…and where does it go from here.
I’m not sure where this BLAWWWWG thing is going to go, or what it’s even going to look like. I have some ideas, and my guess is that it will be rather disjointed, sometimes a laugh, sometimes a cry, sometimes a song, sometimes a movie, sometimes some nonsense. What I’m hoping is that I learn a little bit more about my life and myself and leave something here that will help others learn more about themselves or being willing to open up their own unwritten diary and start exploring.
I might repeat things, I might have memories of people across various interactions, I don’t know, but I think what I want to get from all of this is to feel more like a human again. I’ve become so robotic and uncreative and unengaging and unresponsive and, quite simply, uncaring and full of shit that I forget what day it is, I forget what I’m doing and why, I forget what I even enjoy and I forget where I even am in all of this. I honestly feel like a shell of myself, and who I was, and who I’ve always wanted to be and, frankly, one day I’ll be dead. That person I’ve always wanted to be is definitely living creatively and supporting himself and his family by doing what he loves. So, I guess I’m taking a lead from Neil Pasricha and this might all just turn out to be therapy, for me at least, and a first step in living that life of creativity.
I’m not going to provide too much general background of myself, though I did include a high level About Me, as I’d rather my story, and the story of everything around me, just come out in the writing. I’ll try to be as honest as possible, but let’s admit honesty is tough to even lay hands on sometimes, and can be downright scary, and there are a lot of layers of “full of shit” to dig through. I’ll also try to be as timely as possible, which for me can also be scary, with a post coming once a week on Tuesdays at 6:30 PM. hopefully by Wednesday morning whenever I creatively feel like it (flag football practice on Tuesday nights for my daughter’s team really made an impact).
I welcome you into The Diary I Never Wrote, thanks for being here, I hope the reason we’re all here is to get something out of it that will stir our emotions and make us, simply, better people.