There are times when I wonder why I maintain this blog on an almost daily basis. Why do I sit down and write little snippets of our life, for all the world to read? After musing about this while watching folks walk about the mall today during a much needed holiday shopping respite, I came to a couple of conclusions. I write in my blog because I enjoy writing. And I hope that through my writing I can make the reader laugh, smile or at least not grimace.
There are times that I get a little whacky in here. It comes naturally as I consider myself to be eccentric. I don’t think I’m spooky, I don’t see myself as creepy, but I do see a lot of ‘odd’ with a dash of ‘weird’ on the side. I used to think I frightened people as I often savor a memory of the mundane and will bring up said musing in a conversation. I notice the irrelevant. I say the unexpected. I pride myself on these qualities.
Ask a published author what inspires their words and perhaps they’ll mention the works of Tolstoy or speed reading Wuthering Heights or 1984. Others may have become giddy with the thought of diagramming sentences back in elementary school. Me? I found my literary inspiration in one author back in junior high school. I couldn’t care less about Ernest Hemmingway and Shakespeare does nothing to blow up my skirt, but to this day I can read just about anything by the late Erma Bombeck and thoroughly enjoy the experience. I was a 12 year old boy and still I laughed out loud to passages from “The Grass Is Always Greener Over The Septic Tank” and “If Life Is A Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing In The Pits?”. While I was way outside of the intended audience, even at that young age I loved Ms. Bombeck’s style of writing. I may not have related to everything she was saying (as I did not have a child that held his brother captive in the broom closet, for example), but I loved the way she wrote about slices of life, as she saw it from over her ironing board or through her bay window that looked over identical houses in the housing development. She didn’t try to shock the reader, she didn’t resort to blue words, she didn’t harp on the negative. She just made the reader laugh or at the very least smile and more importantly, she made the reader comfortable.
That’s what I try to do. And I’d like to thank you for taking this little blogging journey with me. I look forward to what lies ahead.
