My blog, your blog […] Doesn’t it all begin with random thoughts we choose to dissect or flesh out in the end?
Until this morning, I hadn’t shared a random thought on my blog in a while. Not on the dedicated page I set up for them at least. It’s about beef jerky if you’re wondering.
And it’s not because I don’t have random thoughts circulating in my head daily. My brain runs on random thoughts. It’s what my life consists of. One random thought after the next after the next. All day, every day — morning, noon, and night. In my dreams and first thing when I wake.
Which, by the way, is Saturday, so of course I woke up at 4:30 AM because my body doth protest sleeping in on the weekends. Why, body? Why!
The problem is, and I can already see it developing as I type this, is the way I viewed this specific page when I created it: they would be written in short bursts, 1-2 sentences. Maybe three sentences if I was feeling spry. An observation like this that happened a few days ago:
A fawn, still with its spots, just burst through the woods behind my house. She’s either spazzing out because she can’t find her mom and siblings or is practicing her hurdling technique. Fairly amazing how nimble these suckers are — fast as absolute hell and make Jordan’s vertical jump look rather pedestrian.
But then I start writing and the random thought goes on and on. It turns into something lengthy with off-ramps and digressions. In other words: a typical blog post of mine. Take, for example, what I shared above about the deer. When I wrote about this the other day, that’s how it started. But I never shared it because I ended up writing another 1,500 words on the topic.
Why? Because 51 words wasn’t enough in my opinion. Let’s hear more about this fawn frolicking about as if it had just consumed a line of cocaine and a four-pack of Red Bulls.
Hence, my dilemma.
I have so many unfinished blog posts and stories sitting on my computer, it’s maddening. Because that thing above about the deer, I write this type of stuff all the time.
Would you like to read about a gigantic house centipede that crawled across my chest at midnight while I lay in bed? I’ve got you covered. How about cleaning the hair out of the shower drain? Hair that isn’t even mine, I may add. I feel like my wife should have to do this particular house chore. I wrote about it. Haven’t yet hit publish because I overthink it:
Do people really want to read about me cleaning long strands and clumps of hair from a shower drain?
Me? Absolutely. Sign me up. You? I don’t know.
As someone not on social media, I envisioned my Random Thoughts page like my own personal social media account + accompanying posts. That is to say, social media without the corresponding cesspool of trolls that lurk under the bridges.
Looking at you Twitter. X. Whatever people call you these days. X, the artist formerly known as Twitter. Any Prince fans in the house?
I remember when you could be humorous on Twitter and not have someone tell you to jump off a bridge because:
- they lack a sense of humor and take things way too seriously, or
- they completely missed the point in the first place
2012, I hardly knew ya.
I know there are alternative social media sites and microblogging platforms like Mastodon. But I can’t bring myself to sign up for yet another platform. I gave up a decade ago on taking this route. Do they not all eventually go to s—t?
Plus, it’s not truly my space. My rules. Not really.
And maybe that’s where I fouled up when creating the Random Thoughts page in the first place — thinking of it like individual social media posts and not a journal/log. Like an extension of my personal blog, which is what it really is.
Your very own log of random thoughts and personal musings is a bit of a throwback to the early Internet
Because this type of page and this type of writing existed on the Internet long before social media. There’s a reason the “Personal Musings” tag took off in the early 2000s.
It’s basically what most blogs were at the start, before they were even called blogs. When they were logs. It was a log of your day or a condensed timeframe in your day.
People would narrate specific moments in their logs. A play-by-play in real-time. Well, sort of. You’d have to upload to an FTP at some point. You’d get someone’s thoughts while sitting on the couch with a severely sprained ankle, eating a bowl of ice cream, and watching a re-run of Matlock.
Okay, maybe that was me in 1997.
I really effed up my ankle that year. Crutches at Christmas and a right ankle the size of my thigh. Probably shouldn’t have been hooping in a pair of low-cut Airwalks.
The difference in a log and a social media post is that social media made it about engagement and likes and going viral. About reshares, impressions, clicks, and all that garbage. A continuous log wasn’t an individual, shareable thing like a social post. It existed on a page with a hundred other past log entries. When you linked to it, you weren’t linking to one thing. You were linking to a baked-in archive of many things.
Nowadays, some bloggers on the web call these pages “Notes.” Others have extended the length and call them “Week Notes.” I dig ’em. I read many. I do find them less like a traditional log though and more like a standard blog post. They’re not all together in one place at one link. They’re separate and contain individual urls to each update.
They’re similar but different than what I’m going for. To each, his own.
Mine will stay as “Random Thoughts” because that name fits better for what I originally set out to create: a version of what my blog once was in the late 90s. A page that has no end until you make it to the first log.
Time will tell if I can again keep it consistently updated as I did at one point. If not, just know the random thought turned into something super longwinded that you’re now reading as a standalone blog post. That, or it’s sitting unpublished 1000-2500 words deep on my laptop and may never see the light of day.
Coincidentally, this started out as a shorter version of the first paragraph. See what I mean?
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