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The Futureheads

There's no getting around the fact that a lot of what I write here is going to feel awfully self-important. Blogging, though public by its very nature, is actually a rather insular and selfish phenomenon. Bandying words (mostly with myself) about my daily bullshit is appealing to someone else only insofar as I can make him/her laugh, or if I'm really on it, I'll elicit some "LOL" and bridge a few of those gaps we perceive between one another. That's my challenge. My rambling here is an extension of the one theme that I've wrestled with for a long time - at what point does all this internalizing and intellectualizing become just a stupid waste? Two of my favorite authors spill considerable ink on the question, but good novelists aren't in the business of offering easy answers, not to mention the fact that, as professional writers, their biases are suspect. I can't help hearing this same conflict in some of the music I listen to (see video); to be needlessly reductive, what's more valuable - the planning and result of the thing, or the actual doing? Timeless question, I know, and I'm neither the first nor the last to cliche it to death (no thanks to this guy). My time is better served dirtying hands, throwing whatever I can at the wall to see what holds up, then devising a way to make everything else just as adhesive. Or I could set up shop under my reading light and let this keyboard do the work. I've sacrificed half a lobe's worth of braincells on this, but that I eventually closed the door on academia (as a "career" anyway), speaks to my ultimate decision. That I'm writing this now is a dead giveaway that I'm also having a hard time dropping the habit cold. This is my compromise.