Writing grows like muscle. The first few times it’s sore and you don’t feel so happy with what you put yourself through, but it gets better with time. As I sit at my desk the breeze tickles my back and I don’t feel like I’ve got anything worth writing. That’s always how it is when you begin—at least for me. Maybe better writers feel differently. But then I reach the end and find I’ve written shit. And then I edit and find some grammatical errors so it’s in fact even more shit than I first thought. But one day I would like to write in a way that moves men’s souls. So I tap away now in the hopes that with practice I’ll be able to write things that are worth my own time and that of others too.
Now that I’ve began dramatically enough, I move to what this first post is really meant to be about. The purpose of this site. Its main goal is to give me a place to express myself. My plan is to write essays on how I see things, how I consider concepts in the books I read, and other idiosyncrasies that interest me in the world. To express myself and share the things I think and the reasons why I think them. It’s a personal project, but somehow I, who like the deep valleys that solitude brings, will feel like I’ve failed if I don’t have others come to read my work.
There won’t be a topic list because I’m a dabbler. But I try not to be a dilettante no matter the accuracy of that label. Because of this planned variation, the site name is only a little bit informative, because as far as I know, the phrase “blue sky thought” means dreaming for the future and not being limited by the present, and that’s a bit too focused for me and a bit at odds with what I believe too. I think we’re products of our environment and can’t think up things that are new. Just rearrange the way we see what we know into patterns that we haven’t seen. But that rearrangement can be sublime.
Consider Van Gogh. He tried to be a priest, an art dealer and washed out of art school before breaking through his creative wall and frantically painting in the twilight of his short life. We’ve all seen a starry night, and artists before him painted them. Indisputably, he saw things differently than those before him, and did things in a way that resonates with people outside of his time and place—just spend a day in the gift shop of the Van Gogh museum in Netherlands and observe all the different kinds of people that buy trinkets with his work on it. What we’ve seen, who we’ve known and where we’ve been informs and limits the things that we can create no matter the capacity for imagination you possess.
My belief in limits on imagination doesn’t mean that I believe that we’re consigned to voyage from birth to death without thinking new thoughts. To me new ideas are like the mixing of primary colors; once the base is there anyone can mix a new shade.
And that’s really the reason why I write. Because I have a naïve optimism that if I mix enough shit together I’ll create new connections for myself and maybe something worthwhile for others too.