My First, Unwieldy Post

This is the opening sentence of my first blog. It’s a horribly boring opening sentence and far less inspired than I would have imagined. You see, I like to think my thoughts are interesting and insightful…but so far, this blog is proving otherwise. I suppose it would help if I even knew why I was blogging, who I was blogging for, where I would like this blog to go. But right now, I know none of these things. I’m just sitting in the office off my bedroom, typing my first blog…aimlessly

So many questions with a blog. Should I use my real name? Should I include personal details about my life…and if so, should I use the real names of the others involved? Should I tell my friends about the blog or bask in the anonymity the Internet affords? But who would be interested in my feeble blog-like flailing other than my friends and family? Such thinking always arrives at the central conundrum that has kept me from adding to the blogosphere for so long. If I’m brutally honest, then I’d hate for the people I am talking about to know what I was saying. But, if the people I’m talking about aren’t reading what I’m writing…then who is? It’s not a problem unique to me…I can only assume that most people who have set their fingers to this sort of undertaking have had to question this balance.

My favorite blogs are those that are brutally honest (or at least appear that way). I read Cheeseburger Brown’s I Am A Cheeseburger religiously and perhaps that could serve as a basic outline. But his balance makes no real sense to me. He masks everyone in his blog with nicknames…but makes no real attempt to preserve the secret identities. I suppose it allows him to keep secret the few people who show up in his blog but who choose to remain anonymous. A fair balance, but you’ve still got to be ok with the idea that when you rant about that horrible thing your brother did to you, there’s a fair chance that your brother will read it. And while I’m sure I’ll work my way up to that level of honesty…I’ll start small and steer away from such confrontations. So, I’ll assume a secret identity for now…and probably later remove that mask.

My name is Moksha Gren and I used to be a writer. Not a professional writer or anything, but I was able to call myself a writer with a straight face. I wrote my first short story when I was three. I dictated to my Mom a riveting tale of my Dad getting attacked my dinosaurs at work. I then drew pictures and Mom bound it and stored it away. I wrote bad sword and sorcery fantasy stories all through junior high and moved on to science fiction in high school and college. I graduated from Truman State University in Missouri with an English degree with an emphasis on creative writing. I had planned on taking some time off school then heading on to grad school.

Instead, I stopped writing.

I traveled quite a bit and had many a story-worthy adventure. But I wrote none of it down. I found a job that paid better than my original plan of becoming a college professor, and slowly, bit by bit, I stopped thinking of myself as a writer. Oh, every once in a great while I would try my hand at forcing some thought that entered my brain onto paper, but the process and result was always infuriating. Thoughts that once would have flowed joyously from my brain, through my fingers, and to the paper before me were now sluggish and cumbersome. Such aggravation seldom lured me back to try again.

But tonight I think maybe I’ll do better. Conditions are right to help me feel inspired to write. You see, my wife is downstairs teaching piano lessons for about an hour tonight. That by itself has clearly never been enough to make me write before. She teaches lessons every Monday night and I’ve always been more than content to hide upstairs and read a book, watch TV, or very occasionally practice my guitar (another hobby I should devote more time to). But what makes this Monday different from other Mondays is that Saturday was the halfway point on the gestation period for our first child. The baby is due in August and we are now closer to having a baby than we are to the days when we didn’t know we were having a baby. It’s a small threshold on the way to a major milestone, but it snaps into sharp relief the fact that this baby is coming, that I will be a father soon. And this has me thinking about my life. I find myself looking back on me through my imagined child’s eyes and thinking that a written record of my thoughts during this time would be interesting to my daughter or son someday. Maybe they’ll be interested as they enter adulthood, or maybe they won’t care until they are nearing parenthood themselves, or maybe they’ll never care. But, if by imagining that my kids will some day want to read my ramblings I am able to sit down regularly to commit a thought or two into words, then it was worth it. And if by sitting down regularly to commit a thought or two to words I am inspired once again to create grand tales of fancy and crawl my way through the sludge that is my current writing skill to find a more polished level of writing on the other side…then I’ll have to start thinking of more ways to use my impending fatherhood to force me to be more productive…because the trick will clearly have proven itself unstoppable against my life’s inertia.

But that doesn’t really answer the question of why I’m blogging. I could easily just keep a journal, a private journal that isn’t posted to family and total strangers. But the idea of instant feedback intrigues me. So, I’ll throw it out into the world and see what happens. I still don’t know if I’ll send my friend and family to the sight, so I have no idea yet who will be reading this. I’ll just keep writing to my presently abstract child until some other audience presents itself. So, to whoever is reading this, feel free to share your thoughts. But for now, I’m going to go play guitar…because I’m sure Baby will want a Dad who can play and sing songs.