Wouldn’t You Know It: All This Blabbing Might Not be What It’s Cracked Up to be

I’ve started blabbi .. er, writing.. again, in a somewhat big way, of late. And there’s no doubt that when enough verbal cylinders are firing, the experience is both warm and fuzzy. I feel a bit like God, what with throwing around the word, especially in light of vaguely remembered scripture about how the word was (is?) in the beginning, etc., etc. But I don’t pretend to be doctrinally sound, or even moderately capable of remembering BIble verses, my having memorized hundreds back in the 1980 timeframe notwithstanding. 2009 is upon me, and my memory has seen better years. But that’s okay with respect to other wisdom about the adulterous (or were they officially married?) relationship between ignorance and bliss.

Moving right along, some of the collective gist of what I’m remembering having read, while convinced what I was reading was in the direction of “Truth”, is that enlightenment has more in common with silence than with noise. With respect to verbal symbols, one might rephrase as follows: enlightenment is inversely proportional to verbiage.

Mind you, I’m not saying it’s true. I’m just saying I’ve gotten that impression on and off (although, now that I think about it, that impression was obtained from more words, which more than a little undermines the point. Maybe. I mean, the entire self-referential nature of our so-called selves is funny that way, so maybe it’s okay for snakes-eating-their-own-tails such as ourselves to obtain nourishment from similarly exhausting exercises in handwaving?)

So, what are we doing here? This endless rush to present words in gob-like quantities to each other? Is it to enlighten? But but but… hasn’t the same gone on in a plethora of ways since the beginning of recorded history (papyrus, Gutenberg, novels, letters, newspapers, magazines, etc.)? And doesn’t the vast majority – if not all – wind up in one scrap heap or another (today’s going by the name of “/dev/null”, for those with ears to hear).

I don’t know. I get the feeling it’s just a whole lot of biding of time. Procrastination, if you will. Just as I wrote thousands of USENET posts in the 1990’s, and now they matter not one whit, so too all this, these various USENET roses by other names (wiki’s, blogs, whatever).

It doesn’t bother me to label what I’m doing, here, “procrastination”, because, what the heck, why not be accurate? Why not admit all possible explanations.

I mean, I could be doing all kinds of other things that are arguably far more valuable than writing whatever comes to mind. Charity work, for instance. Interacting with my kids. Cleaning the toilet. Certainly those kinds of things have a more lasting effect and value than all this preaching to the edit buffer ever could.

But, then, this is rather easy relative to those other things. I’m sitting here with one foot up on a love-seat arm, the other kind of toe-planted into the floor, in a way that indicates I’m not as mature as I should be for my age. It’s four in the afternoon, and I’m still wearing pajama bottoms. Grant it, I have a halfway decent excuse – I’m rather ill (don’t worry, it’s just cold/flu kind of virii), and decided a pajama-bottoms-over-long-underwear combination will speed recovery.

But let’s drop the pajama bottoms image, already. The point is, I’m mostly just wiggling my fingers, here. But I can rather easily pretend to myself I’m doing something significant, because after I submit it, it’ll appear in some nifty font, flowing around fantastic claims (aka advertising), and just basically have the appearance of being as important as articles in the newspaper of my childhood (The Milwaukee Journal) once seemed to be.

Man, all I’ve got to do is wiggle my fingers for a while, go through a typically embarrassing proof-reading step (the quantity and quality of my blunders continue to amaze me), and suddenly I appear to be important. I’m published. Whoa!

Okay. I didn’t mean to possibly demean your doing this.

But am I really too far off track, here?

Might the great and powerful Internet be nothing more than a denial-fueled tower of justification to do anything and everything except what really matters, e.g. raising and becoming better persons, such that the world (which is nothing more than the integral of persons from zero to the total population) becomes a better place, a place you’d rather not escape through a screen?