A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

It’s not you, it’s me.

I need to write.  It’s a simple constant part of my personality and has been for more than  20 years.  The problem is that I don’t fill that need.

For the last eight years I’ve had this forum that I’ve used to blurt out what I needed to, when I needed to and a lot in between.  I’ve done some good and made some serious mistakes here, in measure that seems to favor me more than I’d expect, on reflection.

Twitter came along for me about a year ago and provided a rather delightful outlet for instant conversation and far more.

But something happened with twitter.  I stopped putting anything down here.  And I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating.  It’s as if, with twitter, I simply don’t let enough pressure build up to write anything here.  Any impulse to express something was immediately satisfied, in 140 character blurbs.

I occasionally entertain the idea of automatically forwarding everything from twitter on to here.  But then I come to my damn senses.

See, it’s not the same audience, and that would become problematic quite fast.

In fact, the audience of this site creates another issue.  There is now so much crossover between mpwilson.com and, well, mpwilson that I can’t use this in the same way I used it 8 years ago.

Back then, who gave a crap what I wrote.  Nobody read it and if anybody did, it was certainly not anyone who knew me or had any chance of knowing me.  I’m not sure when that changed.

So now, even when I have built up enough pressure to write something here, I pause over the keyboard and run through the list of people who are likely to see the outcome in the near future (it doesn’t take long, being a modest list) and, more often than not, I go off and do something else instead.

Of course I’ve been gearing up for the Neil Simon quote, from Biloxi Blues:

“Once you start compromising your thoughts, you’re a candidate for mediocrity.”

And I know y’all are gonna howl like stuck pigs at this, but I’ve been more than a candidate for mediocrity of late, I actually won by a landslide and I’m getting bloody well sick of it.

The problem now is severalfold:  When I think about writing, this seems like it would be the natural place to do it. But there’s so very much preventing me from even putting down mundane details of my day without white washing them, much less anything involving any emotional of philosophical introspection that I then just diffuse the energy.

I’ve done more than thought about creating a separate site, starting from scratch with no or merely a couple invitees.  But that’s not really working out so very well either.  I don’t know, maybe I’ll pick it back up. But like so much else, the outpourings just seem like whining nonsense.  Who knows, that could have more to do with my current mood than anything.

I just think the right thing to do is to remove this as a distraction.  Well, today I think that anyway.

Regardless, there are some gems in these near 4000 posts.  Even at my worst I’d concede that.  And while I’m clinically insane about having all my data backed up, I just may begin the winnowing process and actually go through here and delete most of these posts as I don’t know if I could quite bring myself to nuke the thing entirely.

In so many ways I let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  But here I fear I’ve grown content with the mediocre as the enemy of the great.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 19th, 2010 at 11:44 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.