“Blogs make it hard for me to read full articles. Now tweets make blogs hard to read. Soon, I’ll only be able to consume shapes.” Aaron Levie, cofounder and CEO of Box
This is good news I suppose for cave painters. But as writers we have to tremble. Many of us have every intention to write books. In the meantime, we are blogging….
My daughter advises me to keep blog posts short and brisk, “perhaps no more than one or two sentences per paragraph.” (I have to listen to her. She’s the one who helped set up my blog in the first place).
OK, so I am trying. (How am I doing, honey?)
I have to be concerned about my manuscripts, however. Will there even be an audience for book-length works? Then I remember that I read, every day and every night. There’s little blue tin and tint of television light ever emitting from this house. That’s my tribe, and as endangered as it may be, I write for that.
So I see blogging as a literary linking of arms. A pat on the back that we are still here.
I’ll confess, I rather like the regularity of a weekly blog. I also like to imagine that I am E.B. White writing in my boathouse on the saltwater farm in Maine, sending my pieces off to The New Yorker. And although there is nothing particularly hurried to each day up here in Maine, it is amazing how rapidly that weekly deadline comes around. That’s a good thing for an old man like me.
I like the feedback in this too. Look at how one blog can start others writing, and how readily their comments are published. Does anyone remember the odds and the wait with “Letters to the Editor”?
Blogs are accessible. So much so, it’s become the new noun in my weekly writing workshop for seniors. In our workshop we write in longhand, read aloud what we have written at the end of each session, and many of the seniors refer to it as their “blog.”
a little elbow room
a little elbow room 
I love reading, and your blogs are always fun, insightful and not too long from my perspective. Are we going backwards? The caveman communicated through pictures and grunting….a little longer than a tweet.
Your post breathes easy, still brisk but free from worry. Each paragraph lights from one carefree thought to the other. One carries within it, the faint report of flowers, rhododendrens and azaleas, from far, far away (your Seattle home). In that, another thought and the oh-so-subtle hint of salt air, E B White no doubt, calling to me from pages I can not only smell but feel.
Oh, beautiful too, is “the tin and tint of television,” marvelous. Television I repeat to myself, not TV. The four syllable word ending in the zzzsha sound of babies cooing and gurgliing has a much nicer sound than its acronym. Best of all, however, is the “tin and tint.”
There, in my mind, I can look far back and into that fattest of all drawers of my grandmother’s kitchen. There are number of cooking contraptions and many made of tin. Graders, slicers and two-handed mashers with handles and cranks capped by red wooden knobs. Their tin metal construction bears the faint sheen of colors, maybe pinks, maybe yellows or greens, but always blues. Mostly blues like those on the tin foil in the shallow drawer just above me.
Also there, the television is “ever-emitting” as you tell it, casting through the doorway, blue in a soft focus all its own. Grandma is there too , sitting in her rocking chair and eventhough it’s nighttime in my mind she’s wearing her sunglasses the ones with cobalt blue lenses and frames slightly cat-eyed. How I love her.
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The following is how I started my comment earlier today but my mood changed as I wrote, read and reread your post so I substituted what’s above. It’s not necessarily good writing but what I started below is rather ugly so brace yourself.
I am a little angry today, a bit of a pirate, beware and guard your blogs.
Your offspring advises you to keep it short and brisk. A style also used by pundits, paid mouths from Fox. Quipsters. I’ve been watching the RNC, dammit.
#%$@&^)!!!!! Is that brisk enough for ya.
I woke up uneasy this morning —obviously— and I don’t know why. There is nothing imminent, nothing pending on the calendar and nothing more serious in front of me on this quiet afternoon than the patient stares of my purring cat.
Hard work pays off and considering how much I have accomplished in the last two weeks, I should be sitting pretty right now but I’m not. Instead of satifaction, I’m stewing in a pot of contrasting herbs and bitter weeds.
to be continued……
Whoops, I am really messing up here now. I started a repy to my own misguided arrogance above (isn’t all arrogance misguded?) and hit some button that took me off the reply and…..vanished.
What I was saying, apologizing for, was that in my upset state of mind, I missed the meaning of the senetnce that said “little” tin and tint….ever emitting.
Off I went @#$%&.
I compounded things by not really giving the phrase a second thought. Tin? Not color but sound? I am not sure.
But how about my grandmother’s cobalt blue cat-eyed perscription glasses?
Rather than continue my diatribe ad nauseum, suffice it to say that my problem was not the world, the wars, the fires raging around my city, my job or my kids.
My wife had been in bed for two full days and two full nights. Quite ill and I am helpless to do anything about it. Nothing a doctor can do and nothimg I do helps. Often it hurts. She is ill and angry, at the world for being so. She needs rest and quiet. The slightest sounds disturb her as do smells. She is hungary but I cannot cook. I cannot clean. I cannot leave because I am afraid she will need me.
I cannot wish her a Happy 28th Anniversary!
I can think, I can fast, I can wait.
She is fine today. I want her to start reading and subscribing to your blog too.
Kim, your blog is doing fine. You circle the concept and zero in on your own desires. You follow your heart. I recall an earlier blog in which your feelings were somewhat mixed regarding the blog deadline, blogline? Has this all changed?
Your accounts of the interaction between you and your daughters is quite fun. Your husband should be fair game as well. Maybe he has been written up in earlier posts. I’ll check.
I asked my 22 year-old about blogs and he said “The good thing about blogs is that there are no rules.” That may be fine for us but not the mainstream of blog readership, youth. And when they say no rules, I don’t believe a word of it. Rules? perhaps not. But what about norms? unwritten rules? peer review? Ironclad!
Sorry for my misread. It’s like I mispoke. God I hate that word!
Alex