HEADER PHOTO DESCRIPTION:

HEADER PHOTO DESCRIPTION: Desert Storm
NOTE: Open post and then Single Click On first Post Photo to view an album in a more detailed, larger format...

Sunday, February 26, 2012

"An Uncuddled Blog," FashBack Post, October, 2008


It is five AM... darkness has an erie grip on Fivers windows and I have given up on sleep.
We are parked in my brother Dan’s country driveway near Waterville, Ohio. Morning coffee rumbles to a boil over a flickering blue flame while Fiver’s furnace hurls BTU’s of comfort at my feet. Fingers... stiff from a day of yard work and chores... are not yet cooperative. It will feel good to wrap my digits around a warm coffee mug. 
Bobbie rests peacefully under a mound of blankets thanks to the white noise of a jet engine furnace fan; it more than covers fumbles in the dark as wander around trying to come up with something to blog. What would we do without the gift of sleep to get us through the night?
It’s hard to believe eleven months have passed since a wild hair crawled up my bum and persuaded me to Blog an RV Adventure. I guess I thought it would be a good way to keep a faithful journal... reflections and photos from an epic road trip. I tried handwritten journals on previous adventures but had difficultly finding enough time and patience to sustain them. A few readers in work cubes lift a skeptical eyebrow at that... wishing they could be so out of time. 
Someday... when old age has tethered me to a porch rocker... I will no doubt want to relive this vagabond journey; I'll torture grandchildren and guests with my recollections until their eyes glaze over. But I don’t know if my humble little blog will survive technological advances... like just try and find an Eight Track tape player for your old music.   
At a future point the Artful blog will “sleep,” fall dead to the floor from cyberspace with an imperceptible thud. The earth will continue to spin; the sun will come up; no big deal. Just a home movie. I have been thinking of saving the Artful experience from extinction, lately, giving thought to transitioning it to book...  a coffee table memoir of the photos and prose. What is more relaxing than sitting by a window with a hard bound book resting in your lap, especially one with photos of places you haven't been? I want our journey to become that book, something to be picked up on a whim and flipped through, something to share with friends and family and and a tidbit legacy to leave behind after I move on to the Big Fiver in the Sky. 
For what ever it’s worth... the Artful Adventure is a piece of my mind and eye. A book would live beyond my life... laying in wait for another dreamer like me to come along and pick it up. Maybe my dream realized would inspire someone else to chase their rainbow. 
With that in mind, I should spend more time writing and rewriting this drivel into coherent well structured packages. But that would make it more of a sterile newscast than a journal... a sermon instead of a conversation. You see, the Artful blog is not a narrative... it's not a  regurgitation of the history and facts about the places we go... the "who's" and dates and so forth (gag). There are enough other blogs doing that already. Instead, the Artful Blog is more about how those places make me feel, what buttons they push, what memories they stir, what dreams they inspire... as I gaze upon, hike through and drive across. It's about an internal Journey more than the external "vacation." 
Every morning starts just like this...spontaneous, rushed, raw... uncuddled... as I scribble down thoughts and share them with you. It starts with title, or maybe a sentence, and one leads to another and another and another. It's like walking, one step leads to the next until you arrive at your destination, only in our case, "layover" would be a better word. And perhaps it would be a better word for you, too. After all, if life is a Journey there is really only one real "destination," and we should aim to put that off as long as possible.

3 comments:

  1. Mark, I made my 6 month journey [blog] into a book, and it gets picked up often by the grandkids. Well worth doing.

    I wish there had been blogging or I had known about blogging when Rich and I traveled. I kept journals of all of our trips, but I think the ability to insert pictures in a blog makes it so inviting to others. I go back and read the old journals because they contain narratives of so many happy memories--some that would have otherwise been lost.

    The journals and the blog are both so valuable to me, and hopefully will, some day, be valuable to my children and grandchildren.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hobo, is there a place where one could buy your book?

    ReplyDelete
  3. I only had one printed, for personal use, by Blog2Print--and just the part about my trip. I did it for my kids, and it isn't cheap (about $190.00), but in my mind well worth having. Just wish I had had all the trips my husband and I took. Unfortunately, all the pictures I took on those trips were 35mm otherwise I might attempt to reconstruct my journals into blogs.

    I know I saved the blog to my hard drive, which I did because of the fear of losing it in a blogger glitch. I tried to save, recently, and I couldn't remember how I did it or if it's even possible to do any more. So, there may be a less expensive way to have multiple copies printed--I'm not sure.

    ReplyDelete

If you like reading blog posts...from any blogger...consider leaving a "tip" in the form of a "comment" to the author, lest the blog might disappear from perceived lack of interest.