Well.
The long pause after that opening remark was intentional. It’s because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say afterwards. We’ve all experienced it, almost certainly, probs. On this occasion it is somewhat vexing because this morning I thought of something I figured would be a catalyst for content but it has totally left the brain. Or at least moved somewhere else in the brain without letting me know where.
It would be quite useful to install a google thought history in the brain specifically for occasions like this. With it I wouldn’t periodically spend ages looking for my wallet. This is a patentable idea although it’s implementation will likely take some time and chances are I won’t be around to benefit from it.
When you think about it the concept is quite dangerous. Open to abuse. Mind reading. Government intrusion. Someone’s government somewhere. By not pursuing the idea I am doing everyone a favour. Spending hours looking for your wallet unfortunately is just something we have to put up with to safeguard our privacy.
The other thing about writing the word “well” is that by getting something down on paper, albeit virtual, frees up other word generation as is clearly the case here. Whatever you might think of the words. There is a strong element of “who cares anyway”. I watched a very interesting programme yesterday about Scottish landscape artist James Morrison. It prompted me to look up the prices of his artwork (£2k – £4k) to see if there was anything I fancied buying.
My point though is that in the programme Jim, as I will call him, said that he painted purely for himself. What went down on the canvas was not necessarily meant to represent what he saw in front of him but what his feelings were at the time and not really for the enjoyment of others.
That is not why I write. In fact I’m not sure I am really at the stage of putting stuff down that represents my innermost feelings. I’m not ready for that degree of baring all although I suspect that anything written can never achieve greatness without it. I might get there one day. If I do it will hopefully be before my brain totally degenerates.
I have been through a couple or three stages in the process which gives me hope that one day I might get there. The first was when I started trefor.net. This is a blog I have not written for in perhaps five years now but it has several thousand posts and when I started it I kept it quiet because I didn’t really know what people would think. Turned out that ultimately 27,000 unique people a month would think it worth visiting, at its peak.
Then there was poetry. I’ve written poetry at various stages all my life but for a long time kept it quiet. Then one day I thought sod it, I’ll tell people about it and started to put it up on philosopherontap.com. It was amazing how many people came out of the woodwork and told me they wrote poetry as well. Quite a few of them are now published on philospherontap, some under pseudonym. That blog has something like 1,500 posts if I remember rightly. No idea how many visitors it gets because I don’t really care. I do it for myself.
When my interest in poetry started developing I looked around for outlets. I found poetry sites with total drivel on them. People desperately trying to conjure up rhymes without any real skill to go about it. Then I thought who am I to criticise?” People might think the same of my stuff. I did join the Poetry Society and entered a competition. Didn’t get anywhere and then realised that with 70,000 or so entries it was an impossible job to pick a winner. That made me think that belonging to such an organisation was a total waste of time anyway. It was probably full of people who wanted to make themselves look intellectual and that there was a lot of expertise in knowing what poetry was all about.
That was one of the things that prompted me to publish my stuff myself. Originally philosopherontap was meant to be somewhere that all forms of art and philosophy online come together. I looked into the possibility of getting an arts council grant to sit in the Morning Star pub for a month discussing pub philosophy with anyone who cared to join me. Looked like there was far too much paperwork and bureaucracy to make that one work.
Finally there ‘s the stuff I write on Facebook. I usually put the same content on philosopherontap but typically that’s a superset of what goes on FB. I wasn’t sure whether people would be interested but I thought I’d write it anyway. I do occasionally get some positive feedback. I suppose those who might think otherwise don’t think it’s worth the effort to tell me.
If I don’t write to bare all I think I do write because I enjoy making words string together well. I sometimes lament the fact that my vocabulary is not wider but there again I was once told by an FT journalist that they were expected to write as if the copy was going to be read by an eight year old. Not that I’m suggesting that you have a reading age of eight.
There again there was one now deceased but well known food writer who was lauded by his peers but I didn’t like his stuff because I thought he tried to be unnecessarily clever with his use of words just to show he knew more words than the rest of us.
I don’t think I’d stick this stuff on Facebook if I didn’t want people to read it. My philosophy is that if you don’t like it you don’t have to read it.
There you go. All that came from the word “well”. Well I never. Off to play snooker. Ciao.