anablog

When I first started blogging, I just sat down every day at the keyboard and wrote what I was thinking. Usually I would have nothing prepared and no preconceived notions about which to ramble. I’d sit down and write a sentence and the rest would follow. It is my guess that that is what blogging is.
Something has happened since then, I’m not sure what it is. Maybe someone started reading. I’ve definitely got a lot of feedback, especially in the past year. Interestingly enough, the comments on my blog itself have been less consistent during the past year, but the feedback comes in the real world. Indeed, things that I’ve said on my blog have landed me interviews, speaking engagements, guest lecturing gigs, and even a surprise indirect debate with D. A. Carson that I didn’t know about until our “separate” interviews were published on facing pages in a student newspaper.
All that is to say that I think this stuff has really changed the way my mind whirs in the process of putting my thoughts out there. What I toss out gets discussed at great length within my sphere at work, and I find myself formulating ideas and discussions that are of a very different scope than they used to be. In my mind, I’m no longer simply complaining and observing, but tossing out answer ideas and getting feedback from my students. I’m not sure I’m actually blogging anymore. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t think it’s blogging.
I find myself organizing thoughts that are obviously too many for a single blog, so I think about what order they need to be presented in, and get hung up on one that needs to be posted after two others. So I write part 3, but parts 1 and 2 are not as easily tackled, and none get posted in any prompt fashion.
I’ve got no less than three huge topics I want to write about (or post what I’ve already written), but they are all awaiting organization or for holes to be filled in. Meanwhile, I wanted to post a journal of last week’s motorcycle trip. Without a computer, I decided to phone in my entries, but you can see how that went. When we shoved off the second morning, we rode into no man’s land and I either had no reception, or existed in analog mode and my battery was depleted forthright. I employed plan B, and decided to write my journal and post them backdated as if they were current news. I still may do that, but when I got back, I found myself not yet ready to be back and thus went on as if I was still gone. You might say that I continued to operate in analog mode though my phone had long since found its digital signal.
I have to admit that when we left on Tuesday morning, over a week ago, without my computer, I had serious reservations. How on earth am I going to capture thoughts as they fly by at mountain scenic highway speeds, wafted by my brain by high altitude breezes and shifted about by distractions of tiny frozen-in-time towns and general stores with pine floors and quietly conversant storekeepers? What if ALL my thoughts turn into run-on sentences?
But lo and behold, the first waft of mountain air, and I returned from digital man to analog kid. And at the first thought of schedule, the call of responsibility, or even decision making, the analog kid pulls down his baseball cap and covers up his eyes. Alas, the analog kid has thoughts galore, but no computer into which to type them. As a result, you, the occasional visitor to the cyberdeck, show up to find the kid sitting in analog mode under the stars on the real deck, vainly attempting to temporally stretch a week of freedom from all things driven by zeros and ones, a week about which he will eventually write and perhaps backdate, and post for all who have nothing better to do than to vicariously, via digital means, peer into an analog week posted on the cyberdeck.
I will try to hold on to the lesson learned and return to reality in the digital world as an analog kid who sits on the deck to peer vertically into the starlit sky rather than horizontally into an LCD lit screen.
Hey, there’s the moon…

This blog was originally recorded on analog equipment. Care has been taken to reproduce the highest quality possible, but due to the exceptional quality of the digital equipment, some of the original hiss and whir may be heard during playback.

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