I've been perusing various stores of information regarding this thing they call blogging.
My impression is I'm doing everything wrong.
Serious! I mean…everything.
Well, I'll tell ya what—I am flying purely on instinct when it comes to this blog. This biographical log is, indeed, a stream of unconsciousness. I sit down and it starts coming out. Sometimes I find notes left to myself from the previous day(s) suggesting something I might follow up on in blog. Many times, there's a subject in my head when I wake up. (For real, I've got a great relationship with my subconscious, it is superb at serving up the things I need to pay attention to.) But there's been more than one day when I stumble out here from the bedroom, sit down and let it rip.
That's an MO—comes from way back. When I was the rock critic for the Gazette, I would go to the show and, depending on who I went with, achieved heroic stages of intoxication. Of course, being 17 when I started doing the reviews, it didn't take much to make me sluggish the next day.
And I had a deadline for seven in the morning.
Man, I can remember draggin' myself outta bed at six, stumblin' into the kitchen table, where the typewriter was set up, get my three part into the typewriter…and wingin' it. Pure seat of the pants. Frequently I would see the story I wrote in the afternoon paper…and it could have someone else's story. Like it was the first time I'd seen it!
What's that? No, I just couldn't hear ya—oh. I reviewed over five hundred shows in four years. I think the most hearing loss inflicted at a single show was Bruce Springsteen in the Coliseum. I really value my hearing. I can't use earbuds, but I can still hear music from speakers. Plus the music that plays in my head constantly. I can hear that, too.
Where was I.
Oh yeah, I'm doing everything wrong with my blogs. I was just providing a little backstory to my writing career. See, that's how I see this thing. Back in the day, when access to the medium of printing was not widely held, newspapers had columnists. Who wrote what are today regarded as blogs. They had to tell their editor what they were going to be working on, and some had a specific focus. (More backstory, I wrote a pet column while I was working in the feature section of the Gazette.)
In my pea brain, I'm just doin' what the columnists used to do.
I suppose…I could have a little more focus on writing. Right? I mean, this is my 'authors' website. I think the advice here was focus on selling books. And see, I don't give a rats ass if I never sell a copy of what I've written. I'm not in it for the money. Money's about to become worthless anyway.
So that way of doing things does not apply to me. And I'm a lot more as a person than my writerly self. My idea is show the world my thought process. Tickle them with the odd story, man, I'm almost sixty-three years old—I got a lot of stories. Try to inject a little humor, often where it's not appropriate, that's a personal thing, I'm working on it. And besides, it was only the elephant and the chicken joke. And I only did that because of a curse put on me by a witch on the Caribbean island of Blort. (It was a mail-order curse, I never went to Blort or anything like that.) Listen, if you're in the market for voodoo revenge, you should contact my exes. They formed a little group, they get heavy discounts on shit like voodoo dolls and paralyzing powders. They may even do a thing with a book, like a book club, I think.
Ever studied any Tao? No. Ever heard of the Flying Church of Absolute NOthing? No? Hmm. Tao is not a religion. There is no God. I will call Taoism a guide. Suggestions, to find all the good stuff there is in life. I guy named Lao Tzu felt very strongly that the best way to proceed, in anything, was to start by achieving a 'beginner's mind'. He said the mind of the beginner knows all possible solutions. The expert mind knows a few.
That's where I'm coming from right now. Kewl? I play around with words a little bit, wait till you read my second book, The Seven Faces of Ambiguity, I have Easter eggs everywhere. Serious. Between it and its sequel, The Seven Faces of Ingenuity, there are 437 side references, including three different layers of reference just in the title of Seven Faces of Ambiguity. (One of them is there are major parts of this story that pay homage to the all-time great movie "The Seven Faces of Doctor Lao".)
There are lots of ways for doing things. And then there's an attendant constellation of ways not to do things. My general approach is do as the Romans do. Now, if you can just figure out who the Romans are, you'll know just what to do! Wait, what?
By the way, Lao Tzu was a wild man, he had all kinds of good ideas. He really knew The Way. And there's a nifty little book called 365 Tao. Check it out. There are websites and pdf downloads if you can't afford the book (I just saw a copy for five bucks and amazonzilla.) Things are about to get really freaky, my sisters and brothers. I think everybody's going to need a little Zen to survive…