The Write Stuff

Sorry, but I couldn’t resist.

With enough discussion and comments about this whole blogging thing, and the reason for doing it , and how long will it last, doesn’t it get tiring, and so on, I figured it was worth spending a few minutes writing about writing.

The funniest part of this for me, well I guess the whole thing is funny to an extent, but one very funny part, is that there are people that really like some of this stuff, and someone the other day asked “will you actually do something with your writing someday?” The question itself was funny to me because I thought I was doing something, every night for the past three and a half weeks or so, but I do understand the point, and my answer was that I would love to keep doing this, work at it, hopefully improve, and if enough people do enjoy reading these ramblings then eventually take on a larger project, why not? I enjoy writing, amuzingly enough, and yes I know that amuzingly is not a word, but I like it, amuzingly enough my education is in engineering, and I have always worked in businesses that have very little to do with this side of my brain, not entirely fair, but pretty close, and moreover, everyone else in my family studied, and work in something to do with “language arts.” Like I said funny, funny ironic funny, not “funny like a clown funny.”

Why do I do this, and why now, because I have always enjoyed writing, or at least once I was old enough to realize you can write however you want, and breaking the rules is sometimes fun with the written word, and because it actually relaxes me a great deal, to whatever extent I actually relax. The great part about writing in this forum is that I have found that I enjoy the process, the actual writing, and that in a lot of ways it is very much like when I paint. Painting is the first thing I have found in my life where for that period of time I am completely focused on what I am doing and my brain actually stops going one hundred miles an hour in six different directions. Painting is also the only thing I have ever done where how I feel about what I have done is more important than getting the worlds approval. I paint and I write for me, at least to a much greater extent than I have ever done so in my life. That is not to say that I don’t want people to enjoy my paintings, or my writing, it just means I am ok with the fact that some people will, and others will not.

This has always been true for me with books, movies, theatre, and art, where if I like something I like it and if I don’t I don’t. Other views on a movie, or a painting, have never caused me to change the way I feel about that specific piece, I may appreciate someone’s take on something, but it is still whether I like something or not. I would think, believe, hope that this is true for most people, given that all of these things are, at least in my mind, art, of some form or another. As long as I can remember if I like a piece of art it strikes me the second I see it, and at times will “haunt” me for days, maybe not the best word, but it will definitely stay with me, and if I don’t like a piece I never will.

So, to try to get back to some point here somewhere, I am writing because I enjoy writing, I am writing because it is a way to exercise the other side of my brain that truthfully has been ignored for too much of my life, I am writing because I hope that some of these pieces, probably not this one, but some of these may actually make someone smile, laugh, cry, think. The late Jimmy Valvano, North Carolina State basketball coach and ESPN analyst, said during his acceptance speech after winning the Arthur Ashe award, “laugh, cry, and think, if you do those three things every day you will have a full life,” this coming from a man that had to be helped to the stage and died shortly after that from cancer. Jimmy V was an amazing man and an amazing coach, maybe I should write about him tomorrow night, but those words have never left me, and while I know I have not come close to living up to his sentiment I am going to keep trying, and writing is one of the ways I am attempting to do so.

Thank you again for getting this far with me.