Invitation to Blog

Can I blog? I thought you had to be depressed to blog. It is too hard to be melancholy during a blazing Texas summer. The heat beats depression out of you like an anger boxer. I like July but only for a minute and I am thankful for a job that makes me enjoy the coolness of early morning. I used to sit on back dock of my restaurant, smoke a cigarette and watch the sun dance its way up the pasture and scrub-brush landscape east of Greenville, Texas. I miss smoking. I think perhaps that to use the word miss would be an understatement, but lack of vocabulary and unwillingness to use a thesaurus aids its existence in my speech. I do miss it however. Perhaps it is time to begin writing again. Writing is a fickle thing I toss around in my head, like a joke that you are unsure if it is funny or not. Opportunities arise and I open mouth to joke but the awareness of the joke’s uncertain laugh register cause me to blurt intelligibly incomplete sentences. Something like muttering, but with more excitement. Writing finds it way onto my list of things to do below reading the stack of dusty books on my night-stand, and above mowing the lawn. Do writers pencil in times to write inside their hip black mole-skin journals? Another cool looking journal would probably make it easier for me to write. Write about things that are important. Things like God. Or god. Fleshing out the ideas that haunt me, and keep me from stillness. Calmness does peak into in my head and linger slightly during a peak Sunday lunch rush in the restaurant; plates falling out of the window, waiters screaming for set-ups and a small band of Hispanics running the money-machine from the behind the curtain of ovens, fryers, and prep tables. Epistemology, theology, and the rest of the ologies I should have left in the small dorm room that smelled of mold and Drakkar. The theories of theories I should have left with my posters, filthy bed sheets, and Pentium II computer. But I’ve carried them with me and now, as I look back, I ponder the idea of trying to leave them behind. Maybe I should write them down. Flesh them out. Eternalize them in written form. Maybe blog. Blogging jumbles up my brain. In middle school, some friends and I were accused of stealing another friend’s sister’s diary. The story goes on that she actually misplaced it, but her parents neglected to inform my father and the lashing I received was never taken back. I don’t thinking a whipping can be taken back, but I do remember thinking that diaries must be really important if I got a whipping like that one. Reading someone’s thoughts uncensored always gives me a little tingle in the seat of my pants and I remember the fear and hurt I felt almost 15 years ago. I wonder if anyone else turns the lights off, hunches over the computer and enjoys someone’s blog, like a group of middle school boys huddling over a stolen diary, discovering that their friend’s sister doesn’t like school, or her dad, or her period. You do?

Well, turn the lights off, pull the desk chair closer, it’s gonna get really good in a minute.

-Logan
Texarkana, TX