The Habit of Seeing

There is a certain freedom that comes to you when you both realize and acknowledge that your life will never be fodder for a "reality" show, that you are distressingly normal and undoubtedly never will become a rich reality star or even a Kardashian (what IS a "Kardashian," anyway?  Is that from "Star Wars," one of the prequels?  Certainly it sounds like a creature that would drive Captain Kirk or Spock or Deanna Troi to distraction).

The realization/acknowledgement, conversely, gives one freedom to blog.  Like those people out in Arizona or wherever who doggedly send radio signals randomly out into space, in the mostly forlorn hope that someday the signals will be heard by an alien culture that doesn't want to turn them into food, and might even message back, you can sit down, write words, and send them out into the ether, then come back and do the same thing tomorrow.  Of such are our tomorrows made, right?

I'm a newbie to this whole blog thing, and had a hard time even coming up with a title.  My first choice, "The Habit of Seeing," was already owned by somebody.  (Which is irritating because it would have been perfect for me, damn it!  It's a play on my photography hobby and on a book by Flannery O'Connor, "The Habit of Being," which really was just a collection of letters she had written over several decades.  Read that book and you feel you come to know her, which is a trick.)

The title I eventually settled on--"Slow Change, Troubles and Doubts," comes from an old song by Simple Minds (which aptly describes me, albeit in the singular form), "Don't You Forget About Me."  "Slow change" was part of one line, "troubles and doubts" part of another.  I've always loved the song, and figured that my mixing-and-matching lyrics, chances are no one else would have come up with that particular combination before.  It also works for me because I'm slow to change, and have ALWAYS been about "troubles and doubts," it's what I do best.

(It's so weird calling that song "old," by the way--I still hear it on the radio from time to time, but it dates from the early 1980s.  Which makes it old, but new at the same time.)

Thought briefly about calling the blog "Ritalin," for more or less the same reason Simon and Garfunkle, or Simon, anyway, named a song "Kodachrome"--"don't take my Kodachrome away."  I could sing the same about Ritalin, if I were actually on it (probably should be).

To get back to "the habit of seeing," I occasionally take pictures, and likely will post some of them here.  Carrying a camera around, with the intent of actually using it, forces you to develop the "habit of seeing."  Among all the habits I have, and all the habits I could name, that might be the only one worth any kind of while.

Once I get through this introduction stuff, I'll actually get down to blogging.