Categories
Writing

Why I Blog

Writing space circa 1980.

I hadn’t breathed fresh air since Saturday. Even though it was too early for mail, I opened the garage door and walked to the box. Basking in an ambient temperature of 35 degrees, surrounded by sunlight, I breathed. This winter writing life is my best life. From time to time I get outdoors to stay grounded.

This morning I awoke dreaming about California. Where did that come from? There is a post in that.

There was a 1960s trip in the family station wagon so Father could attend a union convention. Mother and we kids went along and spent time with our aunt and uncle in Anaheim, including trips to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. I wore a madras sports coat and a shirt with a Nehru collar. We visited another uncle in Simi Valley whose residence was surrounded by pastures. California didn’t seem much different from Iowa in the 1960s. Maybe that’s because so many Iowans were migrating there.

In 2006 I attended Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. Our company was installing one of the Oracle transportation management software programs. The project taught me a lot about business software. This contemporaneous blog post by John K. Waters describes the conference scene:

My dogs are still barking after five days at Oracle OpenWorld 2006. The Big O took up all three wings of San Francisco’s Moscone Center last week for this humongous event, filled every available downtown hotel conference room, and blocked off Howard Street with tents and Vegas-sized video displays. About 42,000 conference attendees swarmed over three square blocks of the City by the Bay for keynotes, educational sessions, vendor exhibits, and special events. On Tuesday night, about 20,000 attendees spilled into the Cow Palace for a conference-sponsored rock concert. On the bill: Elton John, Joan Jett, Berlin, and Devo. A football-field-length stage with seven (count ’em, seven) massive video displays dominated the keynote auditorium. Conference organizers even put Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s racing yacht on display at the foot of the escalators in the North Hall. It was easily the biggest and flashiest local conference I’ve seen in 10 years of tech-trade-show hopping.

Oracle OpenWorld 2006: The Tech Conference that Ate San Francisco, ADT MAG, Oct. 30, 2006.

I stayed away from the conference at a hotel in Chinatown. Because of jet lag, I couldn’t sleep and jogged through the streets in the middle of the night. Hundreds of homeless people slept and lived on Market Street. I suppose there is a post there, I may have written it in my journal in the pre-internet writing days. What seems memorable from the conference is exposure to many of the CEOs of tech companies and hearing their views of the future of technology. I also determined one hasn’t really lived until seeing Larry Ellison on stage with a penguin.

I made other trips to California yet these two stand out. It is so far away. Most of my interaction with California originated in media experiences through actors, writers and producers who made things for mass culture: movies, television, some books and music. There was Joan Didion’s interpretation of California. It helped more than anything to form my views of the state.

Not long after OpenWorld I started on modern social media in 2007 when our child left Iowa after college. It was a way to stay in touch as they became their own adult person. Since then, social media has become a form of creative expression while learning to live in a complex world. The immediacy of it all was shocking at first, and I have grown to depend upon it as an important way to see the world. Social media includes my first blog, which also began in 2007.

More than anything I write, people read my blogs and letters to the editors of newspapers. I don’t write for the attention, although like today’s sunlight I enjoy being surrounded by it. In a way, I need it. After almost 50 years of writing in public, blog writing is just the current manifestation of my search for a way of seeing to inform my way of living. It serves. As long as it does, I will continue to write blog posts.