The beat goes on
I was a rather stupid child. My teacher in third grade, Mrs. B. was very clear on this point, after she asked me to administer a spelling test to an older peer, and when I naively accomodated his request for help with one of the harder words. She (justly) queried my intelligence, and I did not administer any more tests on her behalf.
Perhaps I was simply too trusting. My parents are very earnest people, and not tricksters by nature. Or it might be that my synapses fire at the same rate as my heart, which is to say, slowly. It was in fourth grade, in an exercise with Mrs. C., that I discovered my own rhythm was about 20 bpm below that of every other student in the room. 65...70...68...and then mine: 40. No kidding.
Mrs. C. ordered me to put my fingers to my jugular a second time before she would concede to put my suspect count on the blackboard with everyone else's. Even then, she could not resist exclaiming, "You're almost dead!" I was strangely proud of my new status as a quasi-corpse.
Now, one can be forgiven for assuming that my counting skills in the fourth grade were little better than my proctoring abilities in the third grade. But, last March, an EKG measured my vascular pump's deliberate strokes at a stately 52 bpm (and this was when my heart was all aflutter after nearly fainting at the sight of my own blood spurting into little test vials). Of course, instead of the pejorative expression "almost dead", my doctor used the benign sounding term "bradycardia" and referred me to a specialist. The specialist reviewed the ultrasound I had received in the meantime, drew some circles representing my valves on the paper they roll out over the beds in the examining rooms, and told me I was fine.
So, if I seem a mite slow at time, I have an excuse: I march to the beat of a lazy drummer.
One
[Cough.]
This blog is (or is meant to be) a way for me to exercise my voice in a different register, one that I hope is more sonorous than the creaky afore-mentioneds, hereins, and wherebys that pervade my workaday legal life. These connectors may have originally helped an argument hang together; today, their knotted meanings only hang the reader! To make matters worse, the writer can only thread his way through their loops for so long before he himself becomes hopelessly and habitually entangled.
Now, in my one-paragraph progression from songs to knots to nets, it has quickly become clear that I am no sparkling prose stylist. But the goal here is not to be a writer, but to become a writer, through practice.
Proficient writing, of course, is not the only goal, otherwise -- especially if I had aspirations of becoming a novelist -- I could craft and redraft my words in private. The blog, by contrast, is the immediate and public expression of the individual, without the honing of editorial resistance. The advantage of this approach is that it gives one the opportunity to participate in a public forum, without the cloying spin that comes from excessive professionalism and over-editing. In other words, the blog allows its author to examine and create a public self, and show his work while doing it, resulting in a kind of "open source persona".
P.S. The reason why I would want to communicate anything in the first place will be considered a given. I might as well ask why you chose to read this far; the lack of a reason does not change the (perhaps unfortunate) fact that it has already occurred.