Following the Same Old Cow Trail?

Here I sit, on another Wednesday night, fingers drumming my desk, inches from the keyboard, taping out anothe idea for today's blog post, my mind already churning it's wheels, waiting for that familiar scroll of paper to be fed to it, where it can funnel it down towards my hands, which move as nimbly as the seperaet keys on a typewriter, each moving silently but for the occassional pause to crack the knuckles, or think of a transition point perhaps.

But sometimes that ream of paper gets jammed, or the mind demands it back, turning the wheels backward, instead of forward. The fingers lay there, idle, not knowing what to do with themselves like a hardy and trustworthy family car which has suddenly become untrustworthy and it put to pasture in the backyard, where grass will be the only thing acknowledging it's presence and decades of service to the same family.

In some form or another, whether it be unambiguous or as vague as nighttime's breath nearly burned away by the pale morning sun, only a few wisps remaining, to whisper of what had been, I always have an idea for a blog post every Wednesday. Tonight was no different. You see, I had intended to write about...writing! My writing and everything that comes with it, more specifically. Which I'm sure I didn't have to spell out for you, but there it is.

But just as that reem of paper was being fed I thought to myself, what did I write about last week? And the week before that, and that? Even if last week's blog post was about an alternate side of myself, Side B of Me, it all boils down to that dominant writer's side I have, and how just as I envision myself in elaborately vintage and antique dresses and high heels, the writer in me is kept as private as my flair for flamboyant dresses and a girl who's personality is the exact opposite of that which they see every day.

Another underpinning of all of my blog posts is old houses. No matter the subject, I can always find that thread - however thin or seemingly nonexistent until I was tripping over it - that connects what I'm talking about to old houses. Now, perhaps it's no secret, but many of my poems are metaphors relating to old houses. For example, in a poem I wrote quite a while ago entitled Nostalgia I wrote about a distressed woman relating her crumbled marriage to the dilapidated state of the old house they once owned together, every disrepair and piece of crumbling plaster was something they ignored or refusd to fix in their own marriage. One line that particularly resonates with me in that poem is the very last line "with all I have lost within this house, I haven't lost myself."

And that, just now, gets me to thinking about a quote I had read, or perhaps heard somewhere, in that vast, pulsating ocean of information, both useless and utterly captivating, that we wade through every day. The quote is this "to be a good writer, you need to write what you know." It would seem, in my case, that I have been following such a claim long before I stumbled upon this quote. Since middle school I have been writing about storms, old houses, small towns, the Great Plains area, tornadoes, troubled but closely knit families, dilapidated old houses...you get the idea. So why then, if it's so obvious that these are such topics I should continue writing about because they inexplicably - and sometimes inadvertently - work their way into every aspect of my life, pose the question that is the title for this week's blog post?

You see, when I logged onto my blogger.com account and clicked on the new post button I had, of course, intended to talk about writing, or something related to it, or something that would eventually work it's way towards being about writing. But then I thought about all the other posts I'd written about writing, and how it has virtually ran like all those low-hanging, musty filled tunnels of thousands of abandoned mines across Upper Michigan through the blog posts that have managed to roll away from that centuries old tree looming above them, only to realize they had come to rest on a gnarly root, not escaping at all, just a little further away.

This of course, led to me posing the question to myself, "why worry about if I talk about writing so much?" I mean, if someone's really into interior decorating - which I happen to love! - wouldn't all of their blog posts be about interior decorating? And if someone really loved music - like my fellow 'sister' and blogger, Melanie Light - wouldn't every one of her posts be about music? Or at least loosely related to it? So why then, am I worried about writing too much about...writing? After all, just like all those people posting blogs about the ever-interesting and progressive restoration of their old houses - a huge dream of mine someday! - or that person charting their across-the-globe travels from one small town to the next, each post, and the blog itself, has a common thread. That single thread that fell down to down three others, which started a braid, which as time went on grew thicker and thicker, until now it's a secure rope. A rope that unfurls itself maybe every day, or once a week, once a month, or even once a year. Whenever that person decides to write a blog post, is when they pull on the security of that rope, knowing that buried somewhere inside is that single original thread, strengthened now by all those ideas accumulating into a common subject, a common base upon which they visit again and again every time they begin typing in the same box I'm typing in now!

So I guess the question posed to you all, my faithful blog followers and readers, as the title of this week's blog post, is a rhetorical one. Obviously in the once again lengthy post above, I answered it for myself. But I pose a question to you, readers of my blog. What are your opinions about my weekly posts? I don't know how many of you are writer's yourselves, although I know all of you obviously. Can you relate to my posts? Do you find yourself skimming over paragraph after paragraph about the qualms and triumphs of being a writer? I realize I haven't talked about music in a while, but really, whatever comes to the forefront each Wednesday is what I write about. And whatever good intentions I start out with talking about music, old houses, the countryside, poetry, or photography, it always, always, comes back to writing, doesn't it?

And that, as the final answer to the question, is proof that I need not worry about going back again and again to writing. After all, if it can manage to relate itself to anything else I happen to think to write about, it must be a bigger part of me, and more influential than even I realized!