January 23, 2002

What do you do when you're tired to the bone, waiting for that one more thing to push you over the edge? I'm pretty sure my one more thing is coming, and soon. Consider this a pre-blog. I'm not blogging about what was or is, but pushing the blog-forward button, telling you another shoe is about to drop. Look up--see it? I do. What's yours look like? White? Brown? Dirty with some gum stuck to it? Mine's one bigass sole (with cleets I think). Poised.

Nothing left but fruition.

If it doesn't stomp me to death, I'll let you know what it brings forth.

In the mean time, I blog. Why not?

David over at JOHO has some interesting ideas on blogging and what we are accomplishing by bringing forth these net voices:

The importance of the weblog phenomenon isn't so much that it enables people to publish their breakfast menus or even their genuine insights. It's that we now know what our "avatars" on the Net are going to be: not graphical cartoon representations but our body of writing. You are what you write. On the Web we are writing ourselves into existence. This introduces into the self the same issues of control, inspiration, invention, deception and play as have always been present in the relationship of authors to what they write.

I think Dave's right on with this, and I think we can take it one step further, and a hyperlinked thought it is: As our fingers wind around the keyboard sketching our online selves--filling in the furrows, the wrinkles, the gleam, the raised eybrow as we go--that avatar we create *recreates* us in the offline world. It is a circle of creation and recreation. That is the joy in it for me--not so much the voice, the self I have created through blogging, but how that unleashed voice is transforming me, the person, the flesh and the mind.

Food for thought. An ecosystem, a food chain, an infinity symbol... I don't have all the answers, but I do know that the hard-copy me, the one who created these five pages of search results on *me*, has been changed by that very act. For the better. I think.

joy. don't forget the joy. it's gotta be here someplace (now where did I put it?)

-night