Two Loves Have I

The French produced a song in the war years of Marlene Dietrich: "Two Loves Have I." At heart I also have two passions: music and writing. I suppose thinking and feeling are more valued to me than even music or writing, but my two passions express what I think and feel, so I try to find outlets for each.

For music I play the keyboards I have bought over the years and the $10 piano I bought from a lady in Aventura whose condo got flooded in Hurricane Wilma. I call it my $10 piano, though I paid her $100 for it because I'm a softie, and paid the movers another $100 to get it up here to Coral Springs. She was, however asking $10 for it, so I insist on calling it my $10 piano.

Unlike the electronic keyboards, I can really whack the heck out of my $10 piano and do so several times a week. There's nothing like the feel of pounding a true piano to release my hostilities and express myself emotionally. It's been a lifelong passion, one I used to make my living doing back in the day. I grew up with music, and I suppose met my wife through music. I must have it. I don't think I could live without it.

Between writing and music it's a hard call which passion I love most, but I know it tilts toward music when it comes to expressing feeling. Suzanne Langer, the American philosopher, called music "the sentience of feeling." I think that's very true.

Writing undoubtedly provides a wonderful outlet as well for expressing my feelings, but it's greater strength is for expressing my thoughts and reflecting upon whatever interests me. I usually do this through exposition, but at times through lyric poetry or fiction if my imagination is so inspired. Such inspirations are becoming less frequent as reality tends to dominate my attention more the older I become.

But it wasn't until very recently I began to appreciate that there is a great divide in my writing needs between writing to myself and writing to share publicly. In my private, handwritten journal I am able to jot down ideas more or less at the speed they come to me, unedited and with no concern for sharing them in blogs or anywhere else.

The mistake I've long made is believing I could transfer to the internet what I write strictly in my own journal, with the same lack of self-consciousness that I enjoy writing to myself alone. I simply cannot say to others, no matter whether family, friends, in a classroom or online, what I can say to myself. The moment I try, I begin to edit. I immediately feel the need to make sense, for one thing, to write coherently in reasonably standard English sentences, and not to just jot wordplay or nonsensical snippets as I feel free to do in my journal.

For another difference I find that I sometimes pray in my journal, which I would never feel comfortable doing online. Prayer, I have found, is nearly the only kind of expression that I can be totally honest doing. It would be absurd tying to be less than honest in prayer; who would I be fooling? Myself I might deceive, but not God. I believe deeply in prayer, but I don't feel comfortable praying online. I do, however, in my private journal.

There are many other differences as well, but no need to go into them here. My subject for this post is still about expressing myself through writing and music, and as I try this venue and that I find I don't need another place to write online. I have my blogs to express what I can publicly and my handwritten journal to express what I only can express privately.

And speaking of my blogs, I began another a few days ago as what I hoped would be a fresh approach, having gotten a bit tired of Writetosayit's look and feel over the years. I began it on Blogspot after trying a couple of Wordpress blogs I was using over at my commercial site, pageamonth.com. And I began it out of spite.

Let me explain:

I read in someone's new Wordpress blog how happy he was to be at Wordpress and to be rid of Blogger and Blogspot, which he said was "like living in the '50's" When I read that, I bristled. I doubt the fellow was even alive in the '50's, but I understood why he felt as he apparently did. Blogger is, in fact, a bit of a conservative dinosaur as a host, and definitely not "hip"--a bit long in the tooth, as they say. Browsing blogspot's typical posts it's rare to find the kind of f-word, in-your-face ranting and insulting language that sully many other sites of other hosts in this age of Twitters and tweets, MySpace chats, Craigslist crud, messaging and other gatherings which abound on the net. Blogger was one of the first to enable free blogging and built it to by far the largest hosting site in the world for many years. I don't know if Wordpress or any other host has matched its numbers yet, but that's beside the point.

I do know this: people on Blogspot tend to be more mature than the tennyboppers and frenetic professionals at Wordpress and other community-oriented hosts. Not necessarily more mature in years but seemingly past the rebellious stage of their lives. The people who run Blogspot also seem to provide sensible help menus and not get carried away with geeky techtalk to bloggers who just want a lay answer to a simple question. Blogspot menus make sense to me and the personality of the templates remains as attractive as anywhere.

The only thing I still find annoying at Blogspot is the hoops set up that force us all to do nonsensical, illegible word verifications for most posting and commenting. Other sites have managed to make this process--which I admit is a necessary one--less confusing and still be effective.

Oh, Blogspot also has a few quirks like producing thousands of duplicate copies of blogs I didn't write to clog up my editing lists. I gave up trying to delete them all after a few hundred. And Blogspot still has a long way to go for those after wider syndication. I suppose they don't want spam creeping in, but other sites syndicate widely in a range of formats through notification services like technoratti and ping-o-matic, and I miss that. Blogspot's still in the '50's that way.

In any case, I like the '50's and liked living in them. I like visiting Disney/MGM in Orlando with it's '40's and '50's themes and art deco buildings. It's what I grew up with. So that young man, who never lived during those times, disparaged what I value, and for that, I won't blog at Wordpress.com (plus the fact that they slap ads on your blog over there without asking your permission, which is why I quit them a few years ago.) If anyone is gonna pay any bills with my blogging, it's gonna be me. Sometimes spite feels good, and Hello Dolly, I'm back home where I belong. It's cool here, man, reeeel cooool....