Where it began

For dinner tonight, I had jambalaya.  It really is the perfect food – particularly during No Dairy January.  The picture in this entry was taken during a game against Western Carolina in November, 2004.

The Post A Day suggested topic for today was, “Why did you start a blog?”

Initially, I was inclined to blow that topic off, as I have all of the suggestions.  Then I looked at what I’d done today (that’d be nothing, friends and neighbors) and figured I’d give it a shot.

The long and the short of it is that I started this thing because I was lonely.  I’d been divorced for about 18 months (separated for a good deal longer than that), had recently had a major falling-out with a girlfriend, was watching my best friend die a slow death, had been seeing my company shrink steadily for close to two years, and I wanted to do something to make myself feel better.

Blank pages have always comforted me.  When I was little, there wasn’t much that I liked more than a brand new notebook because it had all those clean pages just begging me to write something on them.  In high school and college, I’d quite often bring a notebook with me to orchestra rehearsals (where the tuba didn’t play much) or honor band rehearsals (where most of the work is done with the woodwinds) and pen conversations with myself.

I know that that sounds wrong, but it’s not.  I transcribed conversations between two voices in my head.  If you’re wondering, there was no plot.  There was no thought.  There was just knee-jerk writing stuff down. A typical conversation may have started off something like this:

• What are you doing here?
• Why would you ask me that?  I’m always here.  You’re the guy who’s always late!
• Well excuse the hell outta me!  I didn’t know we were punching a time clock!
• Dude, you couldn’t punch your way out of a wet diaper. 
• Oh that is SO mature of you.  What are you, 6?
• That’s not what your mom said last night.
• My mother was in church last night, you moron.

 …and so it would go for pages at a time.  The two voices never liked each other, they never actually made much sense, and only occasionally did they realize that there was a third person there – the guy holding the pen.

The men’s soccer coach and his son watch some American football. Two of his players that year are in the pros today and both have played on the US World Cup team.  One of them, a guy named Dempsey, is one of the best players in the world. 11/2/2004

Either just before or just after I got married, I managed to lose all of the notebooks with my conversations in them.  That’s always bothered me, as I had fun going back and reading some of the back-and-forth years later.  Not to mention the fact that there were other things in those notebooks that I liked.  Short stories, poems, letters that were never mailed….I even started a play at one point about a guy named Ralph Jenson.  Who he was is anybody’s guess.  I called myself Ralph Jenson for about two weeks during my junior year in high school, and the play had the character set as a knight.  He was on his way to rescue a damsel, I believe.  I don’t remember the female character’s name, but she was based on Fara Lockaby, who was my girlfriend at the time.  A number of other high school friends also had characters based on them.  I was probably 50 pages into writing the thing when I let it drop.  Like the conversations, it was never really meant to be anything.  It was just a way to pass time.

When computers started becoming fairly standard – somewhere around my junior or senior year at college – the comfort that I got from a blank piece of paper somewhat naturally evolved into a comfort that came from that blinking green cursor on a blank CRT screen.  My mother had a Kay-Pro “portable” computer that she used to type papers for college kids, and I sometimes borrowed it from her for my own papers.  More often than not, I’d end up writing essays about nothing or short stories or deliberately bad poetry – just because I liked filling up that screen.  And when I had a printer, it was a bonus.  I could fill up the computer screen first and then print out my garbage onto blank pieces of paper.  An epistolary two-fer!

Somewhere around the house, I still have some of those writings.  I used one of them as a part of my portfolio quite regularly when, in the late 80’s, I was bouncing around trying to land a journalism gig.  It (the story) was basically just a description of an evening that I spent on a sand dune at Myrtle Beach, SC.  For some reason, I thought it might show newspaper people that I could write.

After I moved to Atlanta and found out the hard way that I wasn’t going to land a job with a paper, I started writing my own.  It was called “The Thermonuclear Arrow” and was a completely tongue-in-cheek newsletter for my darts team, “The Terminators.”  Published weekly (“published” being a strong word…I usually printed out about 10 copies for my team), it chronicled the team’s successes and failures during league play, enthralled readers with stories of what the team did for fun when not playing darts, offered advice to young dart players, and even followed the harrowing story of Lex Luther, a team member who was brutally murdered by our team captain, Dan Briley….until it was discovered that Lex wasn’t actually dead.

I still have several issues of the newsletter, too.

So early one morning in June of 2005, when I was feeling sad and lonely and desperately wanted comfort, I sat down at the table in my breakfast nook, opened up my laptop, and said to myself, “Self – there are about 40 trillion blank pages on the internet, so why don’t you fill a few of them up?  Just write something.  It doesn’t have to be about anything.  Nobody’s going to read the stuff anyway.”

And there it was.  Stuff Nobody Reads.  Stuff that really was never meant to be read.  It was just stuff to make me feel better.

Generally, it still does.

TWD