…and this is not a question.

How do I add blogs to my blogroll?

Where is my blogroll even at?!

I want to follow this blog, http://thefloatinglibrary.com/ , but I’m new to this whole thing and I can’t even find my blogroll. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

…and these are not secrets.

I used to wonder why so many people posted entries on their blogs containing secrets or sensitive truths. These are the types of things that no one would dream of announcing to a group of friends, and yet they broadcast them in print over the largest form of mass media available today. There are even blog sites that are tailored to the idea of journaling online in a visible forum. Where journaling used to be a book that contained your private thoughts and feelings and was stowed safely under your mattress, bed, or the back of your closet; it was now becoming a public form of “private” expression. This befuddled me.

However, the other day I had a small moment of enlightening and I think I came to a realization. When you have a blog, especially a semi anonymous one, especially a semi anonymous one that has little to no readers, posting private thoughts and feelings to its pages is like yelling your darkest secrets in a room full of people listening to headphones. They could hear you if they wanted to, but they probably don’t even know that you are there, let alone what you are saying. There is liberation in announcing your secrets, in releasing those things you keep buried so deep under your thoughts. Even when you’re announcing them in a public forum where no one is really listening. Maybe it’s practice to share your secrets with real people that you know. Maybe it’s just for the pseudo catharsis that is experienced. I would tend to believe the latter.

Therefore, in the interest of such a catharsis: there is a girl. She liked me, a lot. She told me how she felt often and in rather forward terms. I liked her as well, she was not kept nearly as well informed. There are many reasons and quite a story behind it all, but as none of you know me it’s not really important. What is important is that I think I might have fallen for her.

And I’m scared it might have only been in time to lose her.

…and this is not a blog.

I feel like there are words inside me. Not a couple random words or phrases, not even a few sentences, but novels of words swirling inside me like driftwood in a whirlpool. To bring these words onto paper, is like trying to fish out matching pieces of driftwood with a pool skimmer while clinging to land by a small, but so far tenacious, tree root. Over the past six months I seem to have chosen to hang up the pool skimmer, ignore the flotsam and retreat to the dull safety of very dry land.

But as I lie here, on the moss and dry autumn leaves, I find it impossible to not hear the dull roar of twisting water and the creaks of wreckages it so callously tosses around. I am safe on this woodland bed, but my heart misses the terror and my knees miss the ache that comes from hours of a pulling riptide. Among the tumbling debris, dizzied in the murky inner waters, are the remnants of beautiful ships of various shapes and sizes. Maybe they were once part of a whole and lost their cohesive identity in one of many stormy ocean nights. Maybe they slowly broke and rotted apart under the crushing tons of briny water to finally be carried off to a circulatory eternity of nowhere. Maybe they are nothing but sticks and broken wood scraps with only the faintest potential to be a piece of something larger. Either way, I want to feel their mildewed, rough-hewn surfaces against my hands again. I want to tug them from their watery purgatory and heave them onto the wet riverbank. I want to sort through the chaotic piles and [re]unite the pieces. I want to go back into the water and battle the crushing swells for balance.

If only I knew my way back.

***

I’m not a writer.

I want to be, and I think it is remotely possible that I have the ability to make an attempt; but presently, I am not. I’m a thinker, a reader and a listener who can hear the faint echoes of his own potential future in each thump of his pulse. This might end up being a log of sorts; documenting my journey as I chase down the one thing I could have a sincere passion for on this earth.