A Drop In The Stream

Welcome to the my inaugural post. I can see even as I make my first post that there’s lots more to a successful blog then just writing regularly. Being clear about one’s motivations is a good place to start: am I blogging to be hip, or do I have something to say, or is this just a techie experiment? Clarifying these priorities and goals helped me settle on WordPress as my blog software because I really don’t want to struggle with the platform, and WordPress is a mature and stable piece of software. Likewise, I went with Dreamhost to host my domain because I don’t have the time to nag a startup outfit to do their job and I have friends who have had good experiences with them too.

But why am I blogging? First, I enjoy writing and if I’m going to keep a journal perhaps others would enjoy reading it. Maybe I’ll say something profound and insightful and people I don’t even know will start knocking on my cyber-door? I’m also motivated by the Scorpio’s desire to know the secrets of things, to get behind the facade and see what’s really going on – what does it take to run a successful blog?

On the aesthetic level, there are challenges in this endeavor that I hadn’t anticipated so early on. First, what will this blog look like? What’s it’s theme? Mercifully, WordPress offers a wide selection of pre-packaged themes so I don’t have to put on my artist’s beret this late on a Friday night. Nevertheless, there was a lot more to think about when the style was about me. I settled on a minimalist theme, heavy on text and light on images. I’m not a very visual person and if you are I hope you won’t be too disappointed to stick around and read more, but I’ll forgive you if you can’t take the austere presentation.
Anyhow, keeping things clean and simple, at least at the start, seems a wise course of action. My friend and boss, Ron urged caution – blogging takes a lot of time and effort he said – be sure you want to dive into all this before you start (end quote). But, I’m a “diver” – so I dove – we’ll see how happy or sad I am in a couple of months or so when the daily grind of my worldly blogging obligations begins to wear on me.

So what’s with the tag line you ask? Well, there are enough “rants”, “musings”, “puzzlements” and “discussions” in the blogosphere and all blogs are a stream of consciousness in a certain sense. I went with a traditional title but skewed it with a linguistic barb aimed at the tortured spellings we writers of the English language must learn. My name and the word ‘thoughts’ both share the same odd pattern of pairing two vowels together without really making the sound of either one! Language is like that – slippery – it is one of the many things that is so intriguing about it and this blog will no doubt offer some musings on languages – both human and computer.

The other interesting facet of language is that despite its mystery and our eternal dependence upon it as social beings it can never truly express the unfathomable, impermanent nature of this very moment. Language is ideal for expressing perspective on the past or our hopes for the future but it doesn’t deal so well expressing the fleeting instantaneous nature of reality. It takes to long to say anything about this moment because it is gone before I can type anything substantial about it. Such is the nature even of our fastest discursive thoughts. Our minds richochet onto something else that is either a past event or future yearning. This enigma of the impermanence of all things and our need to say something about it despite its ineffable nature is one of the most interesting conundrums of the human condition. More on this as we go.

Lastly, the somewhat cryptic ‘drop in the stream’ tag line is a reference to my enthusiasm for software and buddhist thought. Software considers the passage of data across a network as a stream of bits and similarly, the Buddha referred to our very existence as being part of the stream – distinct identities but part of something ongoing as well. These are the conceptual ties that cross-pollinate my thinking about work, spirituality, politics and family life and will fill future posts in this humble blog – this drop in the (blogospheric bit) stream.