“Why Write?”

In Hollywood, there’s a superstition against using a question for a movie’s name. Apparently, no one will go see a movie if there’s a big fat “?” at the end of the title. There may be a paper in there somewhere on that, about how movies inform us, tell us how we should feel, and so if the movie itself isn’t sure about what it’s trying to make us think, we instinctively shy away. As for a blog post title, even an initial one, I’ve blogged off and on over the years and never managed to develop a following. As the Mad Hatter said to Alice, “you mean you can’t very well have any less!”

People write blogs for many different reasons. The main one seems to be so that they can share their valued opinions with others. Another is that narcissistic knee-jerk itch some folks need to scratch, as though they don’t have a place or a space in their own lives to assert their own ideas on the way the world should be, and so they dump it into the vast void of cyberspace.

For myself, this blog is my journal space. Is it brave of me (or foolish) to keep such a public accounting of my private thoughts and feelings? I doubt it. Maybe that’s naïve, but I really don’t think this could ever get to the point of enough people reading that it would matter. And in any event, I know how to maintain an anonymous presence online. So in this age where you can find anyone’s personal phone number by looking it up on their facebook page or google profile, those types of personal identifiers for this author and those I might mention here will remain cloaked.

After all, all of this is true.