It’s a line from the movie Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Also a message in a bottle, found among Hurricane Sandy debris on Long Island.
Turns out the bottle had been launched by Sidonie Fery, who’d died in 2010 at 18, falling from a cliff in Switzerland. The Long Island town has erected a memorial plaque quoting the message.
And I’m quoting it because it sort of captures why I’ve been blogging for over five years and writing hundreds of posts. While I do seem to have some fans, it’s not making me a star or shaking the world. But I do it to please myself. And because I’m tough to please when it comes to the written word, I have to be excellent. I wouldn’t bother if I were not striving to maintain a high standard that satisfies my most discriminating reader – me.
So I don’t just whip off my blog posts, a lot of thought and work goes into them. I enjoy doing it. And it reflects my lifelong project of trying to understand the world. You can actually slide through life without that; yet I find it enormously enriches mine. It makes me the rational optimist of this blog’s title. I’ve written before of my “ideology of reality” — basing beliefs on the realities I’ve come to understand, rather than the opposite of beliefs molding perceptions of reality. Too many people operate the latter way, and I often wonder what planet they imagine they’re living on. Orienting readers to Planet Earth is a chief mission of this blog.
Now another word about the blogosphere. You may notice I have around 1000 followers. This is misleading. My followership started to balloon in May when WordPress featured one of my posts. I checked out one of my new followers’ own blogs. Didn’t seem especially intriguing, yet it had a slew of comments. And practically every comment said: “Thanks for following my blog!”
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So similarly, it seems there’s a whole universe of bloggers who sign up as followers on other blogs just hoping thereby to get traffic for their own.
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But, again, I‘m not doing this to get a lot of followers (or funeral attendees). I do it out of my deep love of language and enjoyment working with language, as well as to express my understandings about the world, shaped over decades of reading and thought.
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