WHY BLOG?

People sometimes ask me why I blog. How can I bear to put so much personal stuff out there.  Isn’t it embarrassing? The short answer is no, what’s there to be embarrassed about, I’m only being irritatingly honest. I’m my father’s daughter, and possibly at some gloomy visceral level I’m scared that if I wait till I’m 70, about the age he was when he began writing, there’ll be no words left.  Two parents with Alzheimer’s disease can be a terrifying thought. Wasn’t it Socrates who said ‘An unexamined life is not worth living’.  I guess you could say I’m choosing to examine my life, publicly.  

The long answer is more complicated.  Truthfully, I’m not really sure why I blog. Maybe it’s because there’s a medium that enables me, and seizing opportunities is one of my fortes, like seizing the tail of the big bloody water dragon that spent the night under my bed a couple of days ago, or seizing the alarm in the morning and giving it a good clout. Maybe it’s because I have family and friends in far-off places and I like to keep them in my loop. I’d like to read their blogs, if they’d only sit on their nice Perversi arses long enough to write one. I’m highly confident I’m unoriginal with my words and the way I use them, it’s all been said, countless of millions of times before, but that’s not good enough reason to stop.  I’m a bit obsessed with writing, it’s something I do, and when you live on your own and don’t have telly - mostly it’s a load of croc - you need something to entertain you.  Words simply pass through me, like a good bowel movement, on the way to the sea.  Because Mercury (planet of communication for the philistines!) is retrograde in my natal chart, I often feel inarticulate, the words that are manufactured upstairs seem all sloppy and scrambled eggish, so when I speak what comes out is often counterintuitive to what I want to say, or  mean. Writing helps me feel more eloquent! This may not be your experience of me, but believe me, it’s what goes on in my head. Apparently one in about six people are punished by Mercury in this way, but I recently noticed a pattern. I generally write just prior to, during, and after Mercury does its reversal dance, three times a year for about three weeks. If that’s the only time I should write, it sucks, so from time to time I like to break the monotonous mould and write outside these parameters. I shouldn’t, I suppose, because it’s at these times that you probably find my writing THE MOST EMBARRASSING!  Like now for example. Writing is cathartic, helps me unpack my neuroticism, and is damned well cheaper than therapy.

At the end of the day, to be perfectly blunt, I write a blog because I’m just plain bold!  I’d recommend it.

 Who, me? Bold?