Writer's Hindsight

Recently I wrote in a Yahoogroup about blogs. Typical rant, rambled on and on. But now that I'm reading what I wrote I sorta like the words that came out. Here, I'm retrieving them while writing this rant...

"take inspiration from the muses, take inspiration from the masses. take inspiration away."

I have no idea what I was on during the time I wrote that (just kidding - I'm clean). Sounds nice. Poetic. What was I talking about? I was talking about how blogs are expressions of oneself. You write from experience. Life experience. "live life, love life, life sucks. do what you want, do what you need. write a blog, unwrite a blog. unlearn what you have learned." Strange words, huh? Don't know what came over me when I wrote that. But it was impressive.

So you write. And you ramble. And you experience. And you share. And you write more. Until it becomes natural. Every experience becomes something bloggable. Every little nuance, every joy, pain, sadness you encounter. Makes you who you are. Right?

Everything we do in life nowadays is basically an imitation of something that happened once before. Like in the South Park episode "Simpsons Already Did It" where every "evil" trick of Prof. Chaos, er, Butters, was already done by the Simpsons. See? What we do now, no matter how original we think it to be, was done before. Okay, so maybe I'm pushing it.

But let's be honest. Sometimes imitation is flattery, sometimes its f*cking annoying. Right?

Me, I try to imitate the writing style of Scoop Jackson, formerly of SLAM magazine. Plus a few of my friends who've been influential in my thinking. I try to assimiliate their traits that I admire, while at the same time adding a dose of myself so that I'm not totally imitating them. And that is the flattering part. Imitating someone YET adding your own dose of self to make that emulation a way to glorify the person you imitated. Got it? No? Neither do I. Hard to explain, harder to understand.