Please do not feed the overactive brain...

My brain drives me crazy a lot of the time. It has this propensity to take off on its own and go wandering through the wilds of speculation on an infinite number of subjects. This happens without warning, and can last less than a minute, or it can go on for hours without affecting what I'm engaged in currently at work, or home, or in the truck, etc. The subject matter can range from the mundane details of my personal life (see this post), to why the world seems to be exceptionally FUBAR these days, to the more philosophical lines of thinking.

Not long after I started writing as regularly as I can I saw a post by Atrios which attempted to answer the apparently common wailing cry of many bloggers about why no one reads their writing, and it got me thinking about how I'm approaching it and why this blog's readership not a life and death affair.

I started writing back in April of 2006 not long after I created my Myspace profile in an attempt to chronicle the various trials and tribulations that I had and was still experiencing with my old Chevy trucks. After catching up to the present, I continued to write infrequently about what was going on in my life and what my thoughts were about certain subjects that I was moved to comment on. I vaguely thought that it might be interesting back-round and fleshing-out material for someone who might stumble across my page and wonder "well, all this is kinda interesting, but what's this clown's real deal?" Maybe it's a little bit of an ego trip, but, so be it. Once I saw that there were a few folks out there reading on a regular basis, I found that it was a good forum for me to write about some of the issues I'm more passionate about and get some feedback and/or other views.

I can't find the post to link to for the life of me, but Arthur Silber wrote that a blog is in essence an intimate emotional and intellectual diary the sort of which has never been known before (or words to that effect). This kinda cuts to the root of the whole affair, although I think he lays it on a bit thick with the whole "I don't care if anyone reads any of these posts/rants/essays" here. He may feel that way, but when one keeps repeating something over and over again, it gains the appearance of being an attempt to convince oneself (nonetheless, I enjoy his writing and hope that the pieces that I link to are useful to you). Maybe that's what this is for me, but I hope not. I like to think that I"m fairly well aware of my own self and what my intentions are.

When I started writing about the current course that the US is on at the encouragement of Arthur, I knew that there would be some folks reading what I had to say, which was encouraging, but not the primary motivator. I think I write for three reasons:

I like to write. I did a lot of it when I was in high school, and am not sure what happened in college and afterwards to diminish my output. Time was more of a commodity, but time is never a real factor if you really want to do something, as is evidenced here.

I feel very strongly about many issues in our world these days, and I feel that the more people know about them and how they are affected by them, the better. Even if they don't immediately act on them or never act on them at all, the fact that they were made aware of the issue in question is never a bad thing. this element was a less frequent (but highly amusing to some, the Jaybird in particular, mainly in terms of its format)facet of the blog until very recently.

My mind. My hyperactive, scatterbrained, sock-worrying mind. Hopefully this is a good way to relieve the pressure on my skull from all the thoughts cranked out by that overactive little bugger. Hopefully the release of some of those thoughts will also decrease the chance of catastrophic internal spontaneous combustion resulting from the high friction generated by all those random lines of thought rubbing against each other. I'm hoping it'll help with my dreams as well, since a lot of this cranial material will be put down on paper for all to see as opposed to clanging around for a while, getting bulldozed down into my subconscious only to be spewed back up when I'm in deep REM sleep in the form of wacky dreams that fade away before I'm even half awake (except for the one about the brown bag lunch where it was brainstormed to use "Like A Rock" for the Moon radio spot, right Skye?) I have no idea if there is any credence to this theory, but it sounded good when I read it in Christine long ago.

So here it is, in all its undiluted glory. I'm glad those of you who have been reading for a while are sticking it out. I am certainly not trying to tout myself as some genius prolific thinker on a level higher than everyone else. I have a tendency to rip off posts and throw them up after a cursory proof, mainly to catch spelling, grammatical, and HTML tagging errors, which results in some posts going up that have a slightly different tone to them than intended. If I piss you off, sorry, but I think that too much second guessing ultimately dilutes the attempt to convey true feeling and opinion. If I'm dead wrong on something I'm citing or trying to say please say something. Those of you who know me might be saying to yourselves "oh yeah, he always takes criticism well" and your experience justifies that, but I"d like to think that I've mellowed slightly over the years...