What is the point of all this?
When 24 ended its season with my darling, Jack Bauer, on a slow boat to China- it reminded me that I mentioned my hero being left without a country in a blog entry from a YEAR ago! This caused me to reflect: Damn. I’ve actually been posting blogs to myspace for well over a year.
Then I couldn’t help but wonder- what about this blog that satiates me? Or does it? Why do I spend time doing it?
I’ve often relied on writing it as an exercise for my other bigger and better projects. After all, the best cure for writer’s block is writing. Something. Anything. It massages writing muscles. It oils writing gears. Sometimes they force me to articulate thoughts that I know I think or feel, so when it comes time to make a choice on an imaginary character in my fiction- I can make a choice with more skill and tenacity because I trust my senses from practice. I learn how to pound out structure and to make a point (something I’m sure we’re all missing right about now).
I could also say that my blog is a vehicle for updating high school friends and buddies from college. It gives fodder to my stalkers (I’m quite fond of the cute ones, actually) and probably my arch-nemesis (who I despise). But still- this doesnt inform what I may get out of it
I could also guess that maybe I write them because back in the day when I was bored shittless at my various day jobs (RIP PC Magazine, Benfield, and others), I read blogs from people I was into. Screenwriters, directors, rockstars, geeks- you name it, I read it. Either for inspiration or as an escape from the mundane corporate melodramas. So here! I’m reciprocating.
But going back into that vault of past experience- I actually realized a trend. Even though I may not have had a blog per se, I have done the same shit for as far back as I can remember.
Lets do the time warp again. Through the years I wrote and wrote and wrote
Pre-teen …lots of short stories, comics, and letters to boys
1991-1994 …a zine called “Todays Soup” and kept notebooks circulating among my classmates
1995-1999 …an alternative newspaper called The Free Foundation Press, short stories and college papers
2000-2002 …for websites like writtenbyme.com and various message boards
2003-2005 …Journal Entries at dinomonster.com and contributions to LiveJournal drama
2005-present …a blog at myspace and scribbes.dinomonster.com
I take pictures and video. I’m a packrat of life souvenirs. It’d be fair to say I’m relatively obsessed with documenting my own life (however sloppily). You may be thinking- gee, as though the goo-backs from the future would give a shit about the life and times of Amy Peters. But is it about them? Or how I flashback to a time or emotion upon sight of a photo, feel of a newspaper article, or as I try to recall my rationale for the emoticon and music select on a myspace blog. I remember good old friends buried (literally or just in memories) from my souvenirs. I recall places, situations, smells, sentiments, and loves loved and lost.
Then from all that, I can’t help but wonder if were even meant to remember anything more than what trains us for survival. THEN I wonder if we evolved the ability to keep memories outside our body for a practical purpose after all, or if it’s just lucky series of genetic mutations that will actually lead us to our ultimate demise as it happens to some unlucky creatures.
These thoughts have been weighing on me very heavily lately- the idea of our future and how there’s really not much of one for our kids and grand kids. I don’t mean to sound like one of those depressing soapbox doomsayers we write off as psychos or one of those hyper-environmentalists who riot to eliminate capitalism, corporations, social heirarachy, or other such evil derivatives. I think that as a biologist, conservationist, and gas-purchasing American I’ve gathered that the doomsayer may have missed the culprit, but not the ultimate meaning.
We are fucking up this planet. And I think about this fact constantly. It absorbs me. We’re fucking it up at an unreasonable, unnatural, accelerated rate. The only thing that gives me sliver of hope are thinkers and doers like Bill McDonough, whose book I recently read, Cradle to Cradle. The book happens to be environmentally friendly AND excellent in providing potential solutions. It tells us that we need to remake the way we make things. That design is a signal of intention. And if we intend to further the species as responsible members of that species, then we should design products that give back to the life cycle- actually contribute continuously to sustain ourselves for as long as possible. Such is the meaning of life, isn’t it? (more on that book in the future)
From this train of thought, I invent scenarios like how the dinosaurs were actually once super geniuses who lived so symbiotically with Earth and that everything they invented was properly decomposed by the time we dug them up. Except that their existence gave us the fossil fuels we now bleed for energy, so really we’re throwing away their existence (and countless others) so that we could live like unbridled irresponsible heathens.
Oh, the imaginary irony. We should all be ashamed.
But then that jerk comet came along and ruined everything for the super genius dinosaurs, so what are we trying for? Huh? I often propose that we bust our asses at something that should be wired in us naturally: surviving. All so some stupid comet can come and end it all? Maybe we are special and superior with our “free-will.” Since we have the wherewithal to not bother, then shouldn’t we just stop and be happy with gluttony and ridiculousness?!
We’re all just animals, right? Just doing our thing. There’s no actual way to survive the species consciously. So why not just ride the waves and go with the flow? It’s all pointless anyway because were going to heaven, just turning to dirt, are just little skid marks on the ever-expanding ginourmous universe… or even if we do succeed, some comet will come along and erase us anyway.
Unfortunately, it just so happens I disagree with all those scenarios and others you guys can think of. If asked, I’ll easily rattle off that I think its my personal responsibility to look out for my gene pool by having kids or passing along memes of my dinky discoveries even if it’s just for that. Making room for my gene pool’s offspring and the resources necessary for their survival is job # 1. No questions asked. Have I succeeded as an animal of planet Earth then if I manage to do my part? Or failed because I’m not utilizing my evolutionarily granted choice to not give a shit?
I think I’ve concluded that I write my blog to set up superficial, self-imposed challenges that occupy a window of time normally devoted to hunting, gathering, and warding off predators- all as I’ve said in so many words in a previous blog. All that really means though is that my blog really has no point at all.