Getting started

I really ought to be peeling wallpaper. Or reading something that I'll need to have read. It's not like I don't have stuff to do. But instead here I am setting up a blog because for whatever reason I think I ought to be writing more.

And now I'm writing a post to post on the blog so that it won't be empty to begin with, and wondering what to write about. It's not like I don't have opinions, ideas, things to say, ask anybody who's been stuck in a room with me more than three minutes, they'll tell you. And it's not like I suffer from writer's block when I need to write a memo or feel like ranting about something. But just sitting down and writing, trying to be in the habit of writing, this is different. Without an assignment I'm at a loss for words, and when I press myself to come up with my own assignment the ideas that come inevitably seem too trivial to bother with.

I go on faith, go on going on faith, that I have a voice to find, that somehow I will someday find that voice.

Ever since I was a kid I somehow believed that if ever I was going to accomplish anything of substance it would be in my fifties. Now, with fifty looming on the horizon, I find myself watching that horizon to see if anything's going to pop up over it, any glimmer of light breaking through with some suggestion that what I've been preparing for will come to me. For so long now, every muse I've followed has led me down a dead end. I go on going on faith that at some point it will all add up to something, that a whole greater than the sum of the parts will emerge, but as time passes, doubt creeps in and honesty demands that I entertain the possibility that I in fact have no voice to find.

The wallpaper is waiting. Maybe I'll find my voice there, hidden under two layers of paper and a coat of paint. That would be odd - that paper was put up before I was born and we didn't live here until 10 years ago, so what would it even be doing there? Still, I haven't found it anywhere else I've looked and it feels like I've looked everywhere, so.... Where's that ladder?