mission statement

So this is how it goes. I think I've officially started a blog. At least, I've started to blog, and that may be a sign that all the walls are crumbling to the ground - as if we needed one. It's a new year, and I decided I'm finally buying in. Still, a week into January, my number of posts in 2009 remains at 0, or at a solid 1 after an easy click of the "publish post" button below, that taunting little shiny light at the end of the tunnel that is this slowly filling but nearly vacant text box. New year's resolutions aside, resistance remains. Muscle memory is a difficult beast.

I suppose I can attribute it to a number of factors, all clearly contained within these few paragraphs. I never wanted to support the blogosphere, or contribute to the mass pollution of mindless thoughts its clouds kept trapped in this mess of a web we call the internet. I never wanted to write something off the top of my head and immediately publish it, without giving it time to settle. I never wanted to put out mindless thoughts without conducting research and citing credible sources, whose opinions on my ideas would be far more grounded and reliable than my ideas themselves. I never wanted to admit to printing something for a public audience in the first person, as if to give some indication that I had any strange belief that it was my opinion that mattered at all, and not the covered topic.

Then I realized that isn't why blogs came about, and that isn't why they have been so wildly successful throughout this unnamed decade. The mindless ranting and downgraded standards are merely the natural waste of an infinite web of human thought syphoned through an instantaneous production process. But the nuggets of on the spot insight that just might find their way onto a page, shining through all the trash flying around them, is worth the massive amount of energy spent in the creative process, or lack of process, as the case may be. This isn't just physical energy, either - I just got done reading an article about the carbon emissions of websites that compared the internet to the airline industry in terms of their environmental footprints. 

Even still, I deem it safe for one more page to enter the net. And keep entering it. Pushing publish post must be an instinct, as the body is trained to fight the urge to perfect, to correct, to rethink, and live and breathe in the moment, letting not the thought, but the specific thought at the specific point in time to be the definition of the idea. And so this is how it goes, on toward that little light at the end of the tunnel.