So there I was, watching another black-and-white German art film from the early 70s, thinking, "I must share this experience with the world RIGHT NOW." And thus it is that even though Blogs are So Last Decade, I have decided to launch a new one--quite possibly the 14th I have been involved in, by an unscientific count. The ones that survive, barely, are generally littered with apologies for not having posted in a year or more, followed by something like a YouTube clip of something loosely related to the subject at hand. At this rate, my spinoff book or movie deal will not be coming along quite as fast as I might like.
Truth be told, most of my online socializing and networking these days happens on Facebook, which is just so much easier and has a built-in audience. But I am not sure that much of that audience is especially interested in what I am interested in at the moment, and besides I mainly want a place to keep notes to myself that I can find easily about these various and diverse interests.
I am the kind of person who tends to immerse himself in a topic for a certain period of time, start a blog about it, burn out on it after 6 months or a year, and then move on to another passion and repeat the cycle. There are the trips to Amazon and the library and indie bookstores/record stores, the discovery of cool blogs and other online resources by people who know more than I will ever know or care to learn about this particular subject, the long nights of reading and listening and watching, and then the sense of exhaustion, maybe a brief jaunt of apathy, and then a return to the topic at hand with slightly less enthusiasm but a fresh set of eyes and ears.
Since around the time I turned 50 a year and a half ago, I have been lumping all of them--these various and diverse and ever-evolving interests--into a make-believe course of study in "the University of Ron." Over the course of my life I have been a student sometimes and a teacher other times; both sides of the room can have their moments, but both can be painful, too, if you are a teacher stuck with students who hate you, or a student condemned to spend three long months with a professor who is an idiot. These days, as I enter the Mr. Wilson phase of my life, prone to yelling at the neighbor kids to get the hell off my lawn, I figure I am best off teaching myself about this and that. Ideally this is not the same as being the lawyer who represents himself and therefore has a fool for a client. (There is no course in Mark Twain Studies in the U of R at the present time, but I think he's the man who first uttered that witticism. Or was it Lincoln? Maybe one day I will get around to finding out for sure.)
All I really want from this undertaking--the blog, that is--is a place to keep some notes, mostly for myself. If you want to chime in, by all means, please do. Auditing is encouraged by the University of Ron, and there are no stupid questions, only stupid presidential candidates.
