Obligatory opening salvo
The primary question facing one with the intent to write beyond personal scribblings in diaries is whether or not that material is worthy of being shared. A relative few of us are talented enough to make a living writing, and fewer still have anything meaningful to say that prospective readers should be paying for, or in increasingly more cases, listened to or watched. For the “rest of us”, places like Substack offer a platform where we can try material out, and maybe through luck, or, even better, undiscovered talent, create a revenue stream that allows us to do more of this.
Even so, a “creator” has to have a certain driving motivation for creation. Money is often one, in some cases the only one, but not always. Many of the people I subscribe to at Substack fall into a different group: yes, they’ll happily take the cash you shower upon them, but they are driven to write and share, first and foremost, by some passion beyond the skill of writing itself.
I am of that driven camp. What I share here will be because something is either bothering me or inspiring me (maybe both?) enough to write about it. It is my hope whatever these things become, they will be of value to others. I hope my views of what is important and needs discussion are not just my own, but are shared by other thoughtful hairless apes as befuddled by our current state as I am, and they will find the material here, and consider it interesting enough to spend their time on, and maybe even share with the other hairless apes they find around them. I am not expecting to cash in on this post or any other, as it is the exchange of ideas and/or thoughts I hope to pursue. I realize saying that forever reduces me to bush league dilettante—”real writers” write, and get paid for it—and I’m OK with that: I am not a “real writer”, nor do I have any pretense to being one. I DO have thoughts, though, and I believe they can be shared with you, dear reader, and even if they have no effect on you, at least you won’t feel cheated or your time wasted considering them.
Ideas have been described as memes, spreading through the noosphere, touching each of us. At the bottom of that consideration is the reality those thoughts we formed into ideas, even if they originated with us, don’t actually belong to us. Once they pass beyond our lips/keyboards, those observations/thoughts are open to any and all.
And they should be. They need to be. Our greatest enemy at this troubled point in our history is the limitation of thought, the controlling of narratives, the outright lying and propaganda presented to us daily as “fact-based” information, the bad-faith gaslighting of so many sorry souls whose eyes flame with passionate intensity. I’m here to, in small way, counter that, because I feel called to.
Hopefully, that gives you enough to consider returning….