To Blog or not to Blog is the question

     The literary form I would like to explore is WebLog, now known simply as a BLOG, a journal entry published chronologically  on the internet. Blogs are relatively new, started in the 1990s as online forums, virtual Bulletin Board and chatlines. Diarists   quickly evolved into journalists and journalers with relevant topical discussions and regular contributors and followers. A common genre, that we have been studying here is the personal essay, and its self- reflective tone is well suited for blog entries.

     I have been told for decades that I have a book in me? Friends  have spent thousands to publish on Vanity presses, catering to artistic types,  know how difficult  and expensive it is to promote a book. However, I do know some authors succeed. It is natural that people want to express themselves through clothing, furnishings, hair, makeup, art, poetry and musical  tastes. They  also want to connect to others  even if it is only by   a thread  to the net. Twitter and Facebook can satisfy, or at least wet the appetite  for various shades of intimacy. Blogs have the potential to have intellectual, economic and political consequence as people  gather to listen and write from their own homes with thousands of like minded souls.

     Fellow homeopaths have talked on line for decades but I did not have the desire or time to learn the skill. I was a Luddite. I started waking up to the potential of the Blog, feeling I was losing a valuable opportunity because of my ignorance and inexperience. I have been digitally ignorant until the last few years, but because of St Louis, I have been digitally initiated and even learned to Google open book exams.

    Now we have Live Blogging because of social media’s demand for instantaneous  blow by blow descriptions of sporting events captured by cellphones. Arab spring and Occupy movements also are Live Blogged and influence world wide opinion.

     I have been arrested for my activism and would prefer the comfort of being an armchair rabble-rouser  with more clout than more arrests. I convinced my daughter, Tara to bus down with U of  Toronto students to the Quebec Summit of the Americas 2001, to experience the art of protest in a democracy, first hand. She had left that morning with a head cold, and she reported back, that after being tear gassed a few times, her head cleared up. Her group was tear gassed 28 times and subjected to rubber bullets.  She swore, they were nowhere near the fence, but singing protest songs in a public park.

      I was supposed to bus in with the Council of Canadians,  but my cold was in my lungs and my heart was labouring.   I went to the protest at Kitchener’s city hall. I would have loved to be kept in the loupe with a Live Blogger then. Tara was in grade 13 and doing an English assignment for St Benedict’s, poetry inspired by social injustice. Tara had refused to read until Grade 6, had always been a math person, dyslexic like her Mom, aced that course with a 95 and an overall 95 average that year.

     I talked to Tara about starting a Travel Blog. She has travelled to Korea four times as she earned tuition teaching English during highschool’s summer breaks. After 5 years of studying Engineering at Guelph she left for  Asia. I met her in India and we travelled  for 2 months. She returned home after 14 months of travelling in Korea, Thailand, China, and Vietnam. I had tried to get her to upload photos and descriptions but she kept dismissing my efforts. She kept losing her phones and had not uploaded much to Facebook.

     Conestoga Rovers of Waterloo sent her to California to clean up gas stations from San Diego to Los Angeles. After checking out numerous unsuitable lodgings she decided to camp out, in a friend’s backyard on the beach in San Clemente. She said it was an eye opener living in a gated community in Orange County, with nose, boob and dyejobs driving BMWs everywhere. Unpaid overtime and working nights were not in the job description when recruited by headhunters back home. A Blog would have given her ample opportunity to grumble, and upload pix for friends to admire. She could even publish under an alias. After fourteen months in the California sun, she had only a handful of pix of her Chihuahua, Spenser.

     We as a family have always picked up hitchhikers and brought them home for supper, a shower or even rest a night, if they were going far. I have encouraged Tara to check out Couch-Surfing on line, and when Tara came home from California, it took her 2 and half weeks, as she was having fun zigzaging across the US, meeting strangers, calling me from Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Amarillo,  Nashville, Chicago and Indianapolis. Home for a few weeks, then off to Hawaii, and  on to Thailand but her plans were diverted  by the red shirt demonstrations, so off  to Malaysia and Australia Couch Surfing. After only three days, she found  Oz  very expensive, and because she had only a tourist visa, she decided to come home,  to file income tax and apply for a proper working visa. Weeks later she drove  down to Montana to spend six weeks with her friend Kat, from San Clemente.

     On to Australia and in 3 days she had a job and a room in a Victorian whore house, filled with university students. She has seen much more of Australia than most  Ozzies. Three months in Melborne, 3 months in Sidney, 3 months in Brisbane, 3 months in Perth and mining towns , 6 months in Brisbane and more remote mining towns, and hit by the flooding 18 months ago. She is a true beach bum and loves camping but no Blogging. So I have had to learn the art and explain how living out of suitcase and being lonely can even be a theme which could appeal not just to armchair travellers, but also musicians and other itinerants. Maybe she would write poetry again and take more pictures like she did in high school.  She loves my Blogs and I know I would love hers. Blogging as travelogue  is not only entertaining in the present, but provides a scrapbook of memories for the future.

   Tara emails and Facebooks friends she has met on her journeys, but Blogging is more of a literary art form and the hyperlinks add that little extra flavour to any photos that one uploads. Blogging is not only a free  hobby but entertaining and educational as well. Families Blog Newsletters with uploaded photos and video clips of birthday parties. Small business can flog their wares. Whether it is the New Journalism Peter Worthington describes, or a client that may potentially subscribe to my Blog Homeopathnd for alternative thoughts on Lymes disease or kidney stones, the form offers endless opportunities. Opportunities, alas lost for the years Tara and I spent on the road. Thank God we still have our memories.