I’ve been wondering lately about how personal I was prepared to make this blog. I had originally thought of it as a kind of surrogate for the analogue diaries I’ve been keeping since 1983. One of the gifts I received over the course of 1982’s Christmas festivities was a “1983 Judy Blume Diary.” So the author of “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing,” “Blubber,” and my favorite, “Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, “ launched it all thanks to a expedient fit of synergy. If there was a market for Brand Judy Blume then I was surely it. At least circa ’81. But hey, I made due!

So, I was thinking about how personal I was going to make this blog and I thought, well, “why not make it personal?” My diaries over the last half a dozen or so years have been less and less about recording a daily account of the day’s, well, how about “happenings?” and more and more about using its 365 crisply hard bound pages (I have consistently used Mead’s SD374-13 Business Diary with the Red Moire cover for over a decade and before that, a somewhat slimmer version) to write free form essays, random musings, amusing e-mail exchanges with friends, potential song candidates for ripe summer music mixes, notes taken while viewing movies (always a popular pastime), quotes from newspaper/magazine/web based articles and random song lyrics that veer dangerously between the appropriately nonsensical and the Shania Twain school of “special new Tooth Whitener!” maximum effect sentimentalisms. I’m happy with it.

So, I was thinking about how personal I was going to make this blog…right, and I thought that I’d just go ahead and use this blog, if anything, as an opportunity to keep doing some of the things that I love most- to write, to share and to explore. Seems simple enough. As Wilfred Grimly once said while embodying the gruff, grizzled and lovable elder pitchman for Quaker Oats, “It’s the right thing to do and the tasty way to do it.”