I am very sleepy tonight and I’m not sure why. Perhaps I didn’t do enough today to get my juices flowing. I might be fighting the rampant cold that has lain waste to many a compatriot. The weather has turned nasty here and tonight we’ll have a very hard frost. According to the radio it will be our first true frost of the year- whatever that means. I guess the other frosts were just half assed in their bitterness. Out buying groceries today the wind made me wish that I had gloves on. Regardless of fashion value, I am glad my beard has come in full and my long hair tucks nicely into the back of the coat.

For reasons not entirely apparent to me my page loads are way the hell up, I had 165 hits today, which seams like a lot compared to the daily average of 80, and honestly even that seems like a lot. To be clear that number represents 69 people checking back in to see if I’d posted something new later on in the day. Again, that still seems like a lot of people.

I read a good quote today about blogging at The House of Smoke and Mirrors, “I've been a bad blogger lately, sparse on the introspective rambling and heavy on the artwork. But hey, if you want introspective rambling you can read any one of the billion or so other blogs out there.” It seems like I have no shortage of introspective rambling and that does seem to me to be what the majority of us are doing, some sort of technologically savvy form of group work.

I started blogging as a way to force myself to write everyday and I was specifically writing to the only other blogger I knew: my grad school office mate and friend Jen. Since February this blog has evolved. Jason and BJ have both described blogging as a good way to stay in touch and “observe your friends as the proverbial fly on the wall.”

With the recent expansion of my sidebar to include the blogs of many of the people who had heretofore appeared as characters in my St. Louis life, and the burgeoning correspondences I am having with regular readers, I see the possibility of widening the tribe. I like the tribal metaphor of the chosen family, as the youngest of six kids I like to have a lot of people through the mental house.

I’ve gone back and reread early entries and I wince at the amount of energy it would take to revise that backlog. Early on I assumed no one was reading. It’s quite odd to have regular readers in Spain, the U.K., Taiwan, Canada, and other places and I’m not the best at putting out the good stylistic dishes.

But hell, parties tend to dirty the place up a bit anyway so why shouldn’t this blog have a lived in feel. I might undermine my own credibility from time to time with linguistic missteps, but as an unreliable narrator I think it’s important that you have regular warnings about my human shortcomings so that you don’t make the mistake of taking me too seriously.

To me stream of consciousness writing, which is how I needed to write at first to get anything personal out at all, meant forgetting paragraphs etc. in order to get something blogged quickly before my lunch break was over. I find those early entries to be almost unreadable text blocks.

R has suggested that I use my free time to try and turn some of what is here into a book. I think there are some things that could be revised for publication someday, but mostly what I am trying to do is simply get a better process.

Why are you saying all of this Karl? Because I am looking for a “something more.”

I was on Madeline L’Engle’s homepage early today, you remember her she wrote that Wrinkle in Time book that you loved so much as a kid.



She has a book on the writing life in which she says:

"I have never served a work as I would like to, but I do try, with each book, to serve to the best of my ability, and this attempt at serving is the greatest privilege and the greatest joy that I know."

I like immensely the idea of serving a work and serving your abilities. I think that in cultivating an attitude of service to others we undermine the selfishness that causes us to either hide our talents or to over esteem them. I just want to do the best I can with what I’ve got and that means striving. As I attempt to move toward a better version of myself I am in the market for ideological polestars of the service variety. I’ve had some writer’s block on Joe’s book and perhaps this is my way out.