“Be Excellent to Yourself Dude”

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!”

Reminds me of when, years back, I somehow got on a mailing list about mailing lists, a window into a whole mail-order subculture. I actually run a mail-order business myself and sell plenty. But this subculture instead seemed to be all about mailing lists and how to parlay them to supposedly make money, from people who’d also be encouraged to imagine they could profit the same way. Seemed like a giant chain letter but with no payoff at the end; nobody ever seemed interested in actually trying to sell anything other than pamphlets telling how to make money selling such pamphlets. Maybe the only money being made was by the Postal Service.

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. Perhaps based on Yogi Berra’s dictum: “You can’t expect people to show up for your funeral if you don’t go to theirs.”

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.

So while I blog mainly to “be excellent” to myself, I am also gratified that some people, at least, find something here of value to them. If you are one of them, please feel free to express your appreciation. I am very fond of little pictures of men like Washington, Lincoln, Hamilton; a special favorite is Jackson. My mailing address is Box 8600, Albany, NY 12208.