Macaroni

It is, as I write, 5:45 a.m. I have no idea what I or anyone with a firm grip on their sanity, would be doing up at this hour if it weren’t absolutely necessary. But I’ve been doing it frequently of late and as a result walk around for the first two or three hours as though I had a 50-pound block of concrete on the top of my head. When I get up this early, I always tell myself I can take a nap during the day, but I never do. I dislike naps, and always have. Naps take precious minutes from a finite supply of minutes, and I resent losing any of them.

So I thought I would spend the time until I could go do laundry without fear of the machines’ noise disturbing anyone with writing a blog or two. (I like to have a small backlog to avoid the panic of arriving at a blog day and realizing I don’t have a blog to post.)

People have asked me where I come up with enough things to talk about three times a week. The question always interests me, since as a rule I have absolutely no idea. It’s like standing at a stove watching a boiling pot of elbow macaroni and randomly dipping a spoon into it to pick out one piece. (In case you were wondering where that analogy came from, it’s because all the pieces of macaroni in the pot are the same length, and all my blogs tend to turn out the same length. Not all analogies are good ones.)

There is a certain presumption in writing blogs, primarily the blogger’s somewhat arrogant assumption that anyone really cares what he/she has to say. That, of course, makes absolutely no difference to the blogger: it’s the assumption that counts.

I have often found throughout life that what I am often not aware of how strongly I feel about something until I suddenly see it written down. Occasionally I’ll find beliefs and opinions I was not aware that I had, or at least not to the degree indicated by the words. It truly disturbs me, and we’ve talked before about this, that while I consider myself a generally happy (or at least contented) person, my blogs, especially, too often reveal a bitter, cynical curmudgeon. I don’t like bitter, cynical curmudgeons, and I certainly don’t want to be one. And I’m always trying to explain where this hopefully false impression comes from: the gap between the world as it should be and the world as it is. It ain’t easy being a romantic in the real world.

I lack discipline, a fact that is all too apparent, and when it comes to writing blogs, I am quite sure I have a form of mental Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: I seem unable to pick up a string of thought at one end and follow it to the other. There are far too many distractions along the way. The world is a beach filled with shiny pebbles begging to be picked up and examined and wondered over. And I am always, always aware of a voice calling: “Hurry up, Roger, it’s getting late. We have to be going soon.” I’ve heard that same voice saying the same thing since I was a kid.

So I’ll get an idea for a blog and sit down at the computer and start off, and something I say relating to the topic at hand will remind me of something else that I really don’t want to ignore, or which strikes me as more important or interesting than the subject I started off with, and I’ll wander off in pursuit of it, only to come across yet another thought or idea I really should mention. And that leads to another, and another....

And here I stand, over that boiling pot of macaroni, spoon raised in anticipation.

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