This daily public affirmation has a blog.
Oh, so you’ve figured it out? A little more than forty-odd posts into my persistent writing of these little public missives about my creative explorations right here every weekday and perhaps you are sitting there pondering the point of two hundred words of indulgent affirmation.
I could justify it. I could try and convince you that there was some marketable value inherent in such a prospect, despite that most pursuers of profit have moved onto bigger platforms. I could point at the personal brand value of exploratory concepts in words and sounds and images. I could brag about some hidden big-picture strategy towards a long term personal creative goal.
I could. I won’t. It would all be a lie.
Why do musicians play scales?
Why do runners log training runs?
Why do chefs trial recipes?
Why do dogs howl at the moonlight?
The answer is practice. The answer is habit. The answer is instinct and drive and compulsion to create and make and share and then makes some more. The answer is doing without expectation of audience or purpose or influence or flex. The answer is accountability to self and ideas. The answer is human and even more than that, the answer is universally personal.
Terms FROm this POSt
- audience
- Creativity is often a dance between creator and audience. Art can exist in a vacuum, of course, but the perception of art by a receptive human mind seems to me to a critical half of the creative equation.
- blog
- I am old. And I started posting formatted words and photos online before the word blog had entered the common lexicon. Most people work in the medium of social platforms these days, but being both a product of my time and a stickler for content ownership and control, I still lean into and promote the idea that the blog (a content managed general purpose personal website) is the beating heart of the internet I once knew and loved.
- brand
- Even seasoned advertising and marketing folks sometimes struggle to pin this definition to the ground, but in essence it implies more than a logo or a tag line. A brand is the entirety of how one is perceived by the public, and it can be inclusive of, yes, logos, colours and names, but also values, vibe, and style. Corporate brands are common, but personal brands are an idea that has gained particular prominence in the internet era when people put on a public persona that represents their effort to influence others or promote their ideas, politics, or work.
- flex
- As my teenage daughter explained to me, a flex is just a way to brag about one’s achievements, often intended as subtle commentary but usually recognized as tactless boasting.
- running
- This is not a running blog, but I took up distance running in 2008 and worked my way up to running marathons, including two of the World Majors: New York and Chicago. These days I just run for fun and the social aspect, but it has shaped and shaded so much of the last two decades of my life that there is bound to be a mention on this blog more than I would let on.
- value
- I use this word a lot on this site but I’m not always referring to cash money. There are many ways to find value in something: emotional, nostalgia, spiritual, environmental, social, and countless other personally meaningful ways. I do find the assumption that everything always comes down to coins in the pocket, but that might just be being disappointed with spending fifty years watching the capitalism struggle to deliver on anything meaningfully human.
