Back in the Saddle Again

Fall arrived while we were gone (first mentally gone, as Elder and Younger Girleen passed the first respiratory crud of the season back and forth; then physically gone, to the lovely wedding that took us out of state and far from the madding crowd of school halloween parties and so on) — red-tailed hawks are circling and diving over Interstate 20, picking off the pigeons lured there by the convenience store owners that feed them.

Remember when seeing a hawk was rare, almost unheard-of good luck? (Back in the Crying-Indian Commercial, DDT days of our youths? The fact that I saw FIVE between driving Younger Girleen to school and back gives me hope: with enough media and pop culture overkill, we can change things, and for the better. Slowly, slowly, slowly, and maybe not enough, but I just had the good luck hawk-spotting bestowed upon me so am seeing the world through rosy glasses.

The fact that this blog is back up and running may be illustration of something; serious commitment issues, ambivalence about my writing life, my wishy-washiness in general, but I realized a few things this weekend:

1. I sorta missed the blog, for reasons I don't even want to take the time to examine (my exhibitionistic streak, maybe?)

2. Seeing folks in Texas who read the blog made me realize the best thing about a blog: it forges connection (let's not parse
out how one-sided and solipsistic that connection might be). There're people out there that I just don't want to lose touch with.

3. Klatsching over coffee with friend J about writing and blogging made me really think about a possible difference between "old-school" and "new-school" writing. In the "old-school" literary view of writing: your words are like pearls. You guard them, keep them close and don't squander them. For years I've subscribed to this slightly anal-retentive view of writing: if anybody's gonna see what I write, it better be as polished as I know how to make it. But blogging in specific, and the internet in general are evidence enough: we are awash in a sea of words. I go back and forth on whether or not this is a good thing, and whether or not I should be adding to all this white noise, but after years of parsimony, I figure a philosophy of writing abundance might work wonders for me: maybe there always WILL be enough. For this, for the novel, for writing agent query letters, for anything that might need writing. I suppose that, at its heart, is what this Grand Experiment is really all about.

So yeah... here I am. I'm back; I'm lame; and I missed you. Like everything else, this is a narrative. I shade, I embellish. Take it with a grain of salt...