Painting in the Basement...

Facebook provides us all with a podium from which we can spew. I’ve been spewing here since 2009, starting with a practice run on Myspace before that.

Sure, it’s my “social network” but it’s also a place for me to do what I’ve always done, write little ‘ditties” as I call them. Short stories, jokes, snapshots of life, observations, opinions…whatever I believe to be important for me to get out. Not important to anyone other than myself, but I need to write it down before it’s gone.

It’s been that way since college. Aside from written materials for actual classes, I wrote in notebooks, calendars, scraps of paper, and even bed sheets. LSD nights spawned poetry and prose written onto tie-died sheets with indelible ink.

I’ve gotten myself into trouble by writing poetry and love stuff to girls I didn’t really want any real life love stuff with. So few young men speak openly with raw emotion that It’s like walking a puppy in a crowd and gets the girls every time. Quite often, my frequent letters to the editor angered the majority of readers in the conservative town where I live. At least they were the ones most eager to point out my many failings as a human. That was true on Facebook for my first few years as well. Being politically liberal and espousing views that are considered to be blasphemous to organized religions caused many FB “friends” to pop up and scream at me. The Catholic Church and a long succession of hateful politicians have been favorite targets. Guess I never took the advice of not discussing politics or religion to heart. I do invite civil disagreements and discussions though and would be delighted to listen to a rational defense of any of them.

One guy suggested that I was a pornographer for posting pictures of my daughter taken from her Acroyoga site. She’s beautiful and dressed appropriately for her job. Most yogis don’t dress in heavy cold-weather gear for that. (My other daughter is beautiful too, but she doesn’t wear abbreviated clothing for her work, so I guess I am only a pornographer with the one.)

My opinions are just that. I don’t need the drama or confrontation from those fueled by blind belief without logic. If someone spews negativity towards me without any justification or willingness to discuss it like adults, we’re done. So I’ve played “Whack-W-Mole” here, bonking out the haters as they pop up.

These days I lead a generally quiet Facebook existence. I can post in peace.

Certainly I could post a very long list of things I have no talent for. Don’t ask me to name the winning football team or fix the carburetor under the hood. I’m clueless. I do know that I’m a decent writer though and post my stuff with some regularity. I understand that most people keep scrolling if they see a post that is longer than two sentences. No problem. Of those who plow on, several tell me that I should publish. A book, magazine articles, somewhere, just publish. I guess the conventional wisdom is that if you can do something fairly well, you should seek maximum exposure for it and make some money. I’m not of that school. There are people who do what they do just for themselves. I’m one of them. Hobby artists who paint in the basement. Amateur photographers whose framed pictures only hang on walls in their own houses. That’s me. It’s cathartic. I write to get it out, always have. I do it for me, and I feel no need to do anything more with my posts than put the stuff I like into my blog.

Even fewer people read it there. That’s just for storage. I don’t drive traffic to my blog, hardly anyone reads it but me.

What’s the point? Is there sound in the forest when a tree falls if there are no ears to hear?

Yes, there is.

I write for myself and for my grandchildren, as my Father and grandfather occasionally did for me.

One day, years from now, my daughters can show my blog to my grandchildren and say: “Good or bad, this was your Grandfather.”

For me to be able to speak to them directly like that, to say “This is who I was’” is more than enough.