A few decades ago (more than I will ever own to publicly), a woman thought she was suffering the after effects of too much beer and pizza.  She was wrong.  That pain in the abdomen was me–ready to make my way into the world and to produce hot air of a different kind (and hopefully different quality).

I have decided to celebrate the anniversary of my entrance into the world by entering the world of blogs.

I am not sure what kind of blog this will be just yet; in fact, I am not entirely sure what a blog is.  “Blog” doesn’t even sound like a real word to me—more like a sound that somebody made up because all of the other syllables that the human tongue is capable of creating and giving meaning to were already taken (perhaps by teenagers referencing obscure variations of the marital act).

I know that with a click of my mouse I could look up the meaning and etymology of “blog” and enlighten the readers that will no doubt be pouring in by the thousands, but this will not be an enlightening blog.  I am not even sure that it will be an intelligent blog.  I mean, we’re not off to a rip-roaring start.

But that’s the great thing about blogs.  You don’t need to impress readers because you don’t actually have to have any.  I am thinking of Mark Twain’s quote about those who are intoxicated by the exuberance of their own verbosity or something like that.  (If this were a literary or academic blog, I would check that quote and get it right, but again, nah…)   I am about to go on a bender.

This will in all likelihood be an unabashedly narcissistic venture of self-expression.  Back in school I think we called this sort of thing “free writing” and it was supposed to be what you did before you actually started writing “for real.”  You wrote whatever happened to come into your head without censorship (or acknowledging that it is ungrammatical to use “you” in that sentence and that it should be instead “one wrote…his or her head”) and without worrying about whether it had proper form or even substance, let alone A Point To It.

Free writing didn’t really count, and you weren’t really supposed to let anyone read it.  [Which, to further digress, reminds me of one of my favorite lines from C.S. Lewis: “In Calormen they are taught in school how to tell stories, the way you and I were taught how to write essays.  Only people actually wanted to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone actually wanting to read the essays.” –from The Horse and His Boy].

This blog I think will be a little like free writing. I can’t promise it will have A Point. Topics will vary by time and temperament.  No guarantees of consistent theme or even any theme at all.  That’s the great thing about the Internet.  No need for talent or treasure, only time, and if you are still reading this entry, clearly you have too much of that.

But, according to atheistic evolutionary theory, the entire universe came into being by chance, which according to Peter Kreeft is like saying that a million monkeys hammering away at typewriters after a million years might inadvertently type out Shakespeare.  So, in other words, there’s hope.