Random Rumination: I Wouldn't Send a Knight Out on a Blog Like This!

As I start this, it's a bit after 1:30 PM US/EDT, Sunday, January 28, 2007 — first blog for me, first entry, etc. I think I need to set my own expectations here before I even try to set yours. Strike that; you can set your own. Or rather, please suspend yours; let me just set out a bit of an introduction here. [Much later: Caveat lector and NB: the timesetamp on this first entry is off by several hours. Ah, well.] Yes, of course this is an online journal — but not a tell-all; there'll be no embarrassing undergarments hanging from this clothesline. But I also will not be sweeping much under the rug, either; that makes for unreliable footing. 

I feel as I guess many long-distracted artists likely feel when finally faced with a large, blank canvas, a bare palette, and a heavy box of fresh oils and varied-size brushes… chisels and marble; metal scrap, bronze solder, and a full tank of acetylene; a warm oven, a wide table of cut-up fruits, vegetables, meats, dried spices; like a writer with a fresh, unspotted sheet… of foolscap. No ego here, no chest-thumping, no desperate capering in the corner while everyone's attention is engaged elsewhere. Hence my first category-title: random rumination; “rumination” derives from a word meaning “cud-chewing” — less than palatable an image, but think at least, please, of the thoughtful look on the ungulate's face (think “bull”) as he chews on ideas and possibility. Disregard the resultant effluvium, though. 

So here we'll have my thoughts, reflections, prayers, recollections, lectures, and occasional rants. Though recent years have greatly narrowed my focus into increasingly traditional religious avenues (think Roman Catholic, which I am, but garb me occasionally in jeans and loose, peasant-cloth shirt), my attention and interests wander great distances, generally with little regard to finding my way back. Besides a great fascination in the sciences and history, one of my favorite toys is language — for me, language is a great bucket of Lego ® blocks of many shapes and colors, and a huge table to put things together on.

As is quite obvious, I do like to write, and ordinarily prefer to follow the institutionalized conventions of spelling, grammar, and punctuation, US edition. (And I really do dislike sentence-fragments, but you'll note there are quite a few here. Oh, well. Yes, I'm also a low-grade hypocrite… but I'm really working at lowering my grade further.) Thus you will find no colour here, no metres, nothing organised, no hiccoughing. Exception: I prefer “grey” to “gray”. 

And in me everything is darned frenzied at times — there's so much to do, and so little time in which to do it (and I can tell clichés till the cows come home)! From organizing and cataloging my stamp collection, to translating and greatly expanding notes on our ancestry for my family, to general work (translating, sorting, etc.) my late father's papers — to tons of mundane things, such as my eternal struggle for a tidy room. And I'd like to publish! …more than just in a blog. Much attention is still required for most of my work to be in publishable shape… with the bleak acceptance that there is darned little market for it: e.g., verse, some short stories, drafted-out novels, wide-ranging essays, and so on. 

Beyond and behind all this is an ache, an urgency, to jettison everything I have (ah, but methodically) so I can be free to join the monastery/seminary — really! But if you know me, you know that already. If you're just getting to know me, you'll see.  All for now, friends. At the moment it's almost 2:18 PM, lovely outside: sunlight, some private planes out of the nearby regional airport buzzing by overhead. (I live in the rural outliers of that northeast-U.S. metropolis sprawling between Richmond VA and Boston MA, subsuming Washington DC, Philadelphia, NYC, et al.; two of the lesser cities about 40 minutes away by car, if traffic allows and you're willing not to go greatly over the legal speed limit.) So take the word of a professional, though flawed, child: go out and play! Me, I have some sheets to fold.