Think Small

It's weird how inspiration can come from the most random places. An inspirational link and a quick conversation with my brother and, quite suddenly, I'm ready to start writing on this thing once again.

It all started quite innocuously this morning: Get to the office, throw on a cup of coffee and check reddit for all the easy-to-digest liberal nerd rage I can bite off with my dulled political chops. Years of caring too much have turned me from a youthfully deaf, rabid Michael Moore wannabe into one of those more sage, jaded liberals who believes in the goodness of sharing and equality but is disheartened by the empty promise of politics in America.

I noticed one particular headline that suddenly cranked my fatigued morning brain into overdrive:

This is interesting: Julian Assange's old blog. (web.archive.org)

A blog written by an academic from 2006-2007 touching on some high-minded topics such as freedom of information, love, life and humor? Interspersed with random snippets of useful Ruby code? All on a very non-flashy, flat-style page? Totally fucking early 2000's nostalgia! Where do I sign up?

To me, Assange has never been the enigmatic, borderline Aspy with a serious case of US butthurt that many media outlets have attempted to mis-characterize. To me, he's a man who values the academic principle of openness more than the academic definition of journalism. And that pragmatic attitude garners a lot of respect from me.

Professors and pundits alike may argue all day about the proportions of journalism, recklessness, integrity, fairness and freedom that constitute the WikiLeaks initiative. At the end of the day, though, WikiLeaks itself (especially with this latest iteration of leaked cables) is not dismantling the institutions it highlights. At least, not on its own. They're dismantling the facade. They're exposing the way the world works in a very candid way, leaving the accountability in the hands of those who dare to lie, mislead or at the very least not educate the public at large.

I think that's cool, because history tends to favor openness and expression.

Anyways, back to that blog.

Breezing through the international pariah's random, somewhat intimate wisdom, I found myself awash in one big, awesome thought: He blogs for the same reason I have to blog. To put my ideas out there. To reflect and check myself in a public space. To share and clarify and sharpen my position instead of keeping it in my head. I feel like those higher goals are evident in Assange's blog as they are in this one.

Blogging for me has always been more than just an indulgent exercise in narcissism, though I'd be lying if I said that wasn't some significant part of it :-) It's a giant "you are here, and this is where you've been" map for life. I do re-read my shit on occasion. I bet you're not surprised.

Honestly, I know myself well enough to know that I have never been able to keep track of myself well in my head. I lose myself. I make myself crazy with the sort of deprecating, self-defeating nonsense that left me depressed and insular for the better part of this year. But when I unleash the stream of consciousness into a finite bitstream for public consumption, well, those self-defeating thoughts get pulverized like errant letters by a springy, loud, 80's style backspace button.

So thanks to Mr. Assange for helping me realize and see the importance of writing on my blog once again.

I also chatted a bit with my brother today and, together, we came to another conclusion: That each blog post doesn't have to be some big odyssey of a tome. It feels like everything I've written in the past year or so is some historical essay on the recent life I've been living up to that point. But that sort of defeats the purpose I was just talking about. What I ended up with this year was three or four giant characterizations of my life based on those pivotal moments when I was so emotional or worked-up that I just exploded with prose. But those aren't honest. They're moving, but they're not necessarily me on-the-whole.

The odyssey isn't each constituent post. The odyssey is the blog.

(oops, I ended up saying way more than I thought I would. oh well. I promise the next post will come soon, and be small. twss?)