C I P R I A N I

Quite a break between Memorial Day and Independence Day.  I’ve written myself a few notes in passing about entries I’d like to make and the notes have accumulated and yet, the blog remains bare for the entire month of June.  That’s quite a sojourn into idleness.

I travelled (essay forthcoming) at the beginning of the month and spent the rest of the month in preparation for a possible job.  But that preparation is a shabby excuse at best for not writing here.

I don’t know how bad my depression is.  I know I get the blues, but I also know that everyone gets the blues.  But I do get to dark places sometimes and it’s harder to function effectively.  That’s all I really want to say about that right now, other than that there is a fog.  Sometimes the fog lifts, sometimes I have to fight out of it and June was a bit foggy.  All the energy went into the preparation, and other things got lost.  Multi-tasking, as it were, becomes difficult.  

I’ve been trying for years to decipher how many projects I can truly work on at a time and the answer really comes down to:  depends on my mood.  Sustaining focus, like all things, takes practice and so with that, back to practice…

What if everyone on Twitter was lying?  What if all the status updates on Facebook were bullshit?

What if these people weren’t “at the gym”?  They were not “enjoying their Sunday with family”?  What if, in fact, they “hated the movie” or the vichyssoise at the particular restaurant was terrible?

I don’t claim this is the case all the time.  I don’t think there is a large contingency of people lying about where there are, but I bet more than a few are fooling about how they feel.  And, hell, who knows?  Maybe a few folks are saying they’re “at the club” when they’re in fact, on their couch.  Alone.

I was reading about the ingenuity of Twitter this morning in Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From, and in fact have just started “tweeting” myself, and this little thought occurred to me.  It’s not a great idea.  I’m probably not the first to have it.  It’s not an idea for a movie or a story it was simply a question I thought about writing here and I started looking for a pen to jot it down next to the other ideas.

And that’s how it happens.  The accumulation.  God knows, I have a lot of catching up to do in just about every aspect of my life, but it dawned on me that I should simply just do it now, directly.

So now that that’s done, I can move with no segue at all to Rachel Maddow.

In thinking about the blog, I thought about my entries a few months back on MSNBC where I made some remark about Ms. Maddow in a hard hat and I have to say, while probably harmless, for whatever reason, I feel kind of bad about it.  Now, though I am a fan and respect her, I don’t know Rachel Maddow and I’m certain she doesn’t read this blog because I don’t think anyone reads this blog.  And while I don’t think I said anything extremely insulting in that entry, I did kinda make fun of the hard hat.  So I started thinking about image.  And all the little details that inform it.  

Who are we really? 

Around the same time Tom Cruise got his divorce, I flipped through the pages of Rolling Stone, reading an article about – you guessed it – Rachel Maddow.  The piece included a high school photo of a blonde Rachel.

What’s a Blonde Rachel Maddow have to do with a recently divorced Tom Cruise?  It’s probably none of my business. 

Who are we really?  Who am I?

Johnson speaks of “platforms” in his book which Steve Denning of Forbes describes as “putting together components that are not unique but which when recombined can create something that enables many others to create something new.”  Johnson uses Twitter as an example.

Changing the color of our hair, who we marry, what we tweet, read – and what we don’t because we can’t find the motivation or are too busy, too in love, too lazy – What happens when we just be?  Man’s gotta eat, right?  One can’t simply be and come upon food.  So say what you will, but there’s a fine line between being and dying.  I guess that line is balance.  All the stuff.  The clothes on our back to the words on our blogs…

I don’t know.  Seems something’s still missing.

Now, clearly after mulling through this all-over-the-place-passage, it becomes apparent that quite a few ideas were tangled up inside my brain (and I still haven’t covered the stuff from the notes yet) and unfortunately, as much as I would have liked this to have landed like the second side of Abbey Road, it didn’t.

But the point this morning wasn’t to be good.  It was to get done.  And for right now, that’s good enough.

Besides, I’ve got to eat breakfast.