On the Way to That Place You Thought You Were Going

Creativity doesn’t always come easy. It doesn’t come from a place of merely wanting to write. That doesn’t make it be. It doesn’t always come out the meeting of four well-intentioned guys, hoping to sip from the fount of profundity, hoping to dip digital pens in it and spread it across a blog somewhere in the vast internet. That fount doesn’t beckon to any random call. It wanders about the ether invisibly, alighting upon the unwitting at random, only some of which take advantage of that sudden inspiration instead of vegging out on reruns of Friends on Netflix, or finishing Firefly because it is supposed to be good.

Sometimes camaraderie is worth the trip, even if the goal was to concurrently write something of worth and weight. The goal isn’t always the thing that matters. The goal is a point of direction. The trip to that goal is something more worthy of the time spent, even if that goal is never reached or that goal morphs into something altogether different. Sometimes you get four guys together to write about Seattle music, but you end up eating amazing food, drinking great beer, and having unvetted and directionless conversation while looking out over Ballard to the mountains backed with the oozing yolk of the sun.

This blog doesn’t have to define itself just yet (maybe never). It merely has to be a sounding board. It needs no true goal yet. The trip will define it, if we let it. Its goal may turn out to be rather mundane and unglamorous. That does not say anything of the path that led it there. Write to write. Write when the fount has alighted upon your head. When no-one is watching, you’ve no reason to explain how anything you write fits inside the blog’s raison d’être. We’ve got all the time in the world to cordon things off into themes. Right now, it’s better to just write about something.

So, this is a call to arms (typing fingers?) for my fellow bloggers. Don’t over-analyze it. Write. About whatever. In the meantime, we can revel in the incidental camaraderie of our well-intentioned meetings. And drink beer.