oh look! a navel!!

Well it had to happen sooner or later, so let's just get this out of the way, shall we, so that we can go on to talking about other more important matters such as... er, why i've got this obsession with the voices of poets called Mark?

Presenting:
a self-reflexive navel gazing blog post about blog posts.

So, this blogging thing. Weird. i just had a conversation with an old old friend the other day about blogging and why i do it. Well, in this blog at least, i blog to see myself, to set the darkness echoing (Oh Seamus the Famous, forgive me for this travesty!). Actually, there won't be too much darkness here, just lots of random culture-vulture fangirling that i will try to do in as bimbonic a manner as is possible, so that all this at least provides some amusement for the people kind enough to drop by. The other blog, of course, is a BMW - irredeemably serious, Germanically stodgy, and without any sense of humour. So much for getting any entertainment out of that site!

But what both blogs do is to give me a space where i can articulate my thoughts in writing, and where i can shamelessly self-publish and possibly even get others to read what i've written and talk to me about it if they like. i might as well confess now that, contrary to what seems to be popular belief, there is usually nothing going on in my mind besides a constant mental musical soundtrack that i won't be able to get rid of even if i tried. What this means, for those of you who are not cursed (or blessed) with this absence of thought, is that i go through most of my life not actually thinking about anything, because i seem incapable of holding a thought and turning it this way and that in the way some people seem able to do.

That i even think at all is totally dependent on my being able to articulate these thoughts, in conversation or in writing. When this happens in conversation, there's the chance that i will either shoot my mouth off and say something really daft / offensive / hurtful / otherwise undesirable, or that i won't be able to process any thoughts at all and will just remain quite, quite silent. It's only when i've taken time to digest what has been said by other people and set it next to my own gut instincts that i am able to produce a coherent, clearly-reasonsed line of thought. Most of the time, of course, it doesn't matter if i don't, and for that reason i'm normally very happy to just yabber away about whatever, with whoever. It's fun and invigorating, and gets me out of my mind, which, as i've said before, is usually empty, so you can imagine what staying there too long can do to me. Talking things through with people can be really fun as well, because i get to hear all kinds of different perspectives on things and by doing so test and refine my own thoughts, and because it enables me to get to know these people better. But it's not always that i can find people who are interested in the same things that i'm interested in, and who are free to sit around and yabber about it, at the same time that i am. In the absence of such live dialogue, blogging is a good alternative to having no thoughts at all. And once in a while it feels good to know that i've actually carefully thought something through and that i've come to a conclusion that i can safely say is my own.

And that's why i write.

Utterly self-indulgent, quite unnecessary, but hey, wasn't it the Bard who wrote:
Oh reason not the need! .....
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life is cheap as beasts.

Thanks for indulging me in this. We now return you to your regularly scheduled broadcasts.
...
...