Enter the Blog-gon

Well, here's the first post.

Funny, but I've started this a number of times and gone back to delete things or reword things because "hmm somebody might take that the wrong way". I'm not terribly concerned about being misunderstood in this medium (being misunderstood seems to be one of my fortes - so bash on!). However, I have found that I have become conditioned to constructing written dialogue in a rather stilted fashion - which I attribute to the vast quantity of email I deal with every day.

It seems email has become the corporate opiate - people would far rather construct a thread of quick question and answer emails that go back and forth over the span of hours (sometimes days) rather than pick up the phone and talk to someone directly. Based on some of the emails I've seen, you'd expect more people to be doing that if the written word wasn't exactly your strong suit ("Sorry for the incontinence"....from one that I was copied on from work - I kept it in my archive). I try to avoid sending email as much as I can, I know my strength is not in prose - but HEY! I can attach a spreadsheet with the best of them!

On occasion, I have posted thoughts or comments on bulletin boards or public forums. Yeah - don't do that anymore. To me, these are a good barometer of society - count the number of flame responses you get and multiply by a thousand and that's how many morons there are out there. People will read what they want into things no matter how you try to detail something in writing - the more detailed you are, the worse it seems to get.

So, a sense of conditioning starts to creep in (at least with me). Stick to facts, offer opinion substantiated by objective evidence, feelings and intuition out the window...add a dash of numbers and top off with at chart. But here, this will be my little venting place.

I named it "The Bug's Bar" because I like to play bartender and some of my fondest memories were hanging around with my friends (way back when) at the Duke of Somerset gabbing on about whatever crossed our minds at the time. My hopes are that this will be a nice place to write things that my friends and family might read from time to time - which means I won't have to elaborately explain myself.