I, BLOG

copyright 2005 Dale Hansen - no reproduction without permission

I am not a BLOGger.

You may have noticed.

I have been paging through some of these wonderful BLOG sites and I’ve noticed they are consistently full of short, pithy stories of daily life. I have become interested in the comings and goings of people I have never met, though I have begun a sort of correspondence with a few.

Leaving aside the word “pithy” for a moment (a good choice for a word like that!), what I write here is neither short (as has been pointed out), nor does it much concern my daily life. That’s not what this BLOG is for.

I write because I can’t stop. It’s like breathing, eating and sleeping – my three favorite activities. I write when I sleep, when I watch TV, when I drive, even when I’m reading someone else’s book. I can’t help it.

So when a friend of mine told me he had a BLOG, the second thing I thought was; “Sure, it makes sense for you, you have something to say.” The first thing was “BLOG? What in the world is a BLOG?”

The more I thought of it though, the more it exited me. Here was a small window which I could use to ease the pressure of writing. I was once told, and still believe, that “nothing you write is ever complete unless it’s read”. Writing is as much a form of communication as anything else, and communication involves more than a single person.

Besides, by this time, my friends were visibly cringing every time I would walk up to one of them with a piece of paper.

So is it harder to write something when you know for a fact that there are people you don’t know reading it?

Maybe.

Its so much worse when you know no one will ever read a single word and that no matter how polished and tight your tale, no matter how much time you put into edits and rewrites, your narrative will never be finished.

So thank you for reading this.

I hope I have explained in some small (but wordy) way how much it means to me when you do.


-Dale