The Old Man's Post

AN INTRODUCTION

Though long schooled in the art of public silence, a few years of observing the power of the Blog and the broad public fascination with it, have tempted me to add my own contribution to the cacophony of voices already out there.

My object with this personal website publication, is the preparation of any essay, commentary, review, memoir, verse, short story, or anything else that comes to mind, written from the personal perspective of my advancing age (post-80) as I observe the world from small town west coast Canada. I will likely include selected observations I self-published and distributed to a few family members and friends in the five year period beginning some ten years ago in what I then called my Passing Thoughts volumes.

The risks are obvious enough, I suppose. Each time one offers an opinion or comment there is a risk of offending someone else. Each publication can be examined for defamatory content and could invite legal retaliation. Every comment made can be misconstrued and invite abuse from the more ignorant or dismissal from the more wise. The principal risk, of course, is that the undertaking will be totally ignored. In that case I am sure it could be discontinued and dismantled, hopefully with little risk to whatever small competence of financial security I still possess.

My personal profile has not been added to this first effort, as I am mainly interested in finding out if I can make this thing work. Should anyone actually be interested in an old man's notions ever be interested in my background, probably that profile can be added at a later date. Having been on the Web simply to obtain specific information or to read the odd news outlet's Blog, but after picking up Mark Frauenfelder's book, Rule the Web, I decided to give it a try. Perhaps it is something I can do at this age to keep my brain's synapses connected and stay a bit ahead of the acute case of RAS (rapid aging syndrome) that has plagued me this past year.

One of my pet peeves is the abundance of old age jokes that populate my email Inbox, often without a personal message of any kind. I realize, of course that most of these friends and relatives who have me in their address book, never learned keyboard skills, but even a word or two would always be appreciated.

For now, I'm going to let this go as my first Blogging attempt, and see what happens.