Why I write: eccentricities, revolutionaries and kitesurfers on a frigid Mid-western lake.

 Greetings, Geekranters!

I haven’t written much of late. I must admit, as I did in my last post, to struggling with motivation.

It seems that for many people this season of COVID 19 and its related restrictions have led to a period of introspection and a resulting cry for change. Change in themselves, in other people and the world around them. 

This has led, it seems to me, to an increase, if that were possible, in people’s willingness to use the internet and social media to express such a desire and longing for change.

 On the one hand, social media and the internet in general has become a battleground for opposing ideologies, differing philosophies and diametrically opposed world views; a digital and virtual conflict for hearts and minds. On the other hand, it has also become a location of cathartic release for many, a confessional for airing past hurts and speaking out grievances, a potential sanctuary for emotional healing.

All of these voices seemingly fall into the prophetic, a broken voice in the electronic wilderness crying “ Declare the way of the…(insert personal cause or injustice here.) As the writer of a blog, a publication, which, by its very nature dwells in the electronically coded and constructed hallways and corridors of the internet; this is the new landscape I find myself writing into. 

It has to be acknowledged that I am not much of an activist for anything and I’m not sure that I have a compelling personal story to share with the world. I’m not filled with righteous anger and indignation at any injustice in the world, because who am I?, in the final analysis, to judge the rest of the world when I have enough trouble keeping my own mind straight.

I don’t write for any of the grand and world shaking reasons that people seem to write today. I also don’t want to tell you what the best restaurant in town is or give my opinion on the latest Marvel movie. I don’t think I’m equipped to change the world. 

I enjoy writing as a pursuit for its own sake, which is not to say I don’t enjoy people reading it or knowing that I have some level on impact on those readers. Writing is something that exercises my mind and maybe while it does that it will have the added benefit of entertaining anyone who happens to read it.

I enjoy the art of putting words on a page, the act of creating something out of seemingly nothing. I am enamoured with the way that rhythm and meter, sentence and paragraph, subject and emotion, work in seamless harmony to transmit ideas to the reader. Not just ideas, however, but dreams and imaginations, new worlds and ancient civilisations. 

I write because I know that many times I communicate better through the written word rather than the spoken. I write for the reason artists practise drawing, I think I might have some small skill in my art and I hope to get better at it. I write out of the overflow of an enjoyment of reading and I hope that some people will get that same enjoyment out of the words that I commit to paper.

Now it seems, the internet is all about the polemic, the revolutionary statement, the digital call to arms of a new generation. Activism and Justice are the keywords of the day and everything that is written down must have a part to play in changing the world or so it seems that it must be deemed wasted.

I’m not sure my writing can change the world, I merely write about what I see, the peculiarities and eccentricities of life, the differences and similarities between the two worlds that I sometimes feel caught between.

The British eccentric is a classic stereotype in the culture and literature of my native land, all the way from the very alien (but still totally British) DR WHO to Margery Allingham’s detective/sleuth/adventurer/spy Campion, Douglas Adam’s hero Arthur Dent, trudging through the universe in nothing but his pajamas and dressing gown to Sherlock Holmes keeping tobacco in his slipper and other less salubrious aids to concentration in a drawer.

Eccentrics are everywhere, of course, not confined to a single culture, but maybe only the British have made them such a centrepiece of our fiction. Maybe we’re all a little eccentric in our way, and I think that’s enough. I want to write about eccentrics not unite behind a cause or try to find a label for them to use as a rallying cry.

All of that which is to say, I’m not sure that my writing fits in the kind of world that now exists online but you will forgive me if I stop keeping silent and just try to write more regularly and in the way I always have, about the eccentricities of life and the beauty of the world. 

Such as kite-surfing, which is a perfect way to change the subject and show my love of eccentrics all the time. In all my time writing this blog, I don’t feel I have really said much about Madison, the city I live in, itself. Possibly this is because Madison tends to defy categorisation. It is a very unique city, in so much as despite its uniqueness, it doesn’t need to tell you how unique it is at every possible turn like Portland, Oregon or San Francisco. 

Kitesurfing on an inland lake in the middle of a midwestern city on windy day in April, however is definitely eccentric, totally unique and possibly extremely deranged, yet that is exactly what I saw a man doing out on Lake Monona as I drove home from work down Monona Drive. 

Spring is a strange time in the midwest, for it is both a herald of the coming summer and a reminder that the dying winter will return one day. Many of the nights are still full of frost and icy breath, the days occasionally showing hints of the sun drenched humidity that the year will bring eventually. The day that I saw the kite surfer was not one of those latter days.

 The wind was whipping up like the beginnings of a spring storm out in the North Sea, the sun was skipping in and out of dark cumulonimbus clouds trying to decide whether it or the rain was going to win that day, Monona Drive was quiet that day and the whole stage seemed set for some epic event, when I saw him, a middle aged man in a wetsuit carried it seemed twenty feet in the air by his kite and the flip that he had just made. 

He seemed oblivious to the wind and the clouds, to the wintry chill in the air and the oncoming rain. He was, it seemed lost in the moment. The only thing that he needed, was for the lakes to be unfrozen and that was enough. I suddenly realised, as I watched him, that that is how I want to write. I wish to be oblivious to what the world thinks that a writer should write and instead be caught up so much in the moment that I just write for the sheer joy of it; if the paper is there and my mind isn’t frozen by writer’s block anyway. And that is why I write about the eccentrics.