The Smudges of There

2/27/08

I've never written a blog before. But I suppose everyone has written a blog once in their life, in the form of a journal entry or casual note to oneself. Perhaps it becomes a blog when it is shared with somebody, or when it's converted into electrons onto liquid crystal and bright lights and released out into the air for peoples' browsers to gather, iron out and interpret. Thinking is blogging. Being is blogging. There aren't any rules to it. I'm an advocate that writing is the absolute best way you can organize the electricity running through your brain, an art unparalled by simple vocalization, movement or witness. All of my life I've written often to no one in particular, just writing at random to make sense of the air that circles in my lungs and the light that penetrates my eyes. I thought it would be entertaining if I started writing aloud, publically, to everyone in particular. I wrote a song about this sort of thing once, about the irony of public print, and there's no other way to try on a suit than to put it into practice.

When you sit and write you force yourself to confront your insides, an act that much of the world is too afraid to do very often. While trapped inside a box of electricity, or better yet a piece of paper wielding only pen and wit, you're watching the moments and the minutes that are stored inside the corridors of your head fall out of the confines of darkness and into the light of day, smudging your human fingerprints all over an otherwise you-less existence. Granted, the world is ever-expanding and there isn't much space left to smudge, people have been smudging for thousands of years. Some smudges stick and others fade, but the only thing that matters the most is that the print you smudge is yours, and only yours. Whether your mark lingers for eons for others to study or if a breeze carries it tomorrow and spreads it into a thousand grains of nothing all across the globe, the only thing that matters in the end is that you were there. You were there just as much as anybody else was there, Josef Stalin was there just as much as Jerry the locksmith was there. The day I squeezed into this world and stole my first breath I was there just as much as the President of the United States was there. Will you still be there if you don't organize a smudge into a series of patterns representing that you were there, proclaiming that you had feelings and insights and angers and passions unlike anyone else before? You'll still be there. Just being there says you're there, and the smudges come from the breaths that you steal and the vibrations of your atoms modulating throughout the air in and around the skin you're in at this very moment. I guarantee on the scale of the balance of everything in the grand scheme of the universe that Shakespeare's "Hamlet" sits dead even in weight and purpose to the silent symphony of vibrations coming from a lonely man standing mute on a street corner in Boston, not that they're equal in meaninglessness, but that they are identical in brilliance.

Enjoy the glory of being there, where ever there is. Amplify there with words, with sights, with sounds, or smiles or changing your pants daily. Writing won't take you there, you're already there. But it'll make there an incredible place to be.