500th blog...(the honest toil of writing)

This is my 500th post.  

It's been almost 4 years of slogging through blogging.  It has been the best of times; it has been the worst of times.  There are moments when I don't feel I have anything else to write about; there are moments within those moments that I don't feel I have anything left to say about life.  But then there are moments when I can't shut myself up, I am a Tasmanian Devil spinning to and fro with more to say that I have time or finger-energy to type out.  

The life of writing has become almost an obsession to me as of late, and it is this blogging phenomenon that has sprinkled something in my drink to intoxicate me.  I feel drunk sometimes on my love for/of words and phrases and how when they get placed into a sentence just so, they can induce goosebumps.  The evocative, provocative life of writing has bewitched me.

I don't know what there is about letters and words and phrases and sentences and paragraphs and chapters and books that hold me hostage.  I love even the dusty smell of old books.  If you peek around the corner in a bookstore or a library you may find me with a book cracked wide open in my hand sniffing the crease like a little boy huffing gas in the garage. (I know a little something about that as well, but I'll leave that story for another day)  It's a mix of dust and ink and recycled paper and cardboard all braided together.  You can even throw in the unpleasant smell of mothballs if you like and I'm still a taker.  I'm a sucker for literature.  

I love reading things via the internet, but it doesn't hold a candle to the antiquated ritual of reading a hard cover book with coffee stains and earmarks and faded pages edged with an almost smoker-stained yellow--if that's a color.  I love making little notations in pencil that come to me in the moment, sometimes woven together with the threaded theme of the author, sometimes a disconnected dreamworld of doodled chimeras.  I love circling words that are new to me, ones that I wish to add to my emaciated vocabulary.  Oh, how I wish I had a better retaining wall to hold in all those beautiful words I came across.  But alas, I leak something terrible.  I sand bag, but at the end of the day, my IQ isn't what I wished it was and the words that I come across vanish from my short-term memory leaving my vocabulary as malnourished as it was a day's start.

So to commemorate this, my 500th blog, I just want to say that I wouldn't trade a day of my life for another.  For every season has impassioned my heart whether by feast or famine.  Both have served to strengthen my affections.  Both have guided me to where I sit, how I sit.  

Oh, how I love to read good writing.  I'm hoping that I can one day write good reading, but even if that day never comes according to my inner expectations, I will write just the same.  

So far all you writers out there, pick up your palsy pens and make music of your musings.