I am thoroughly convinced that people don’t write enough. As I’ve taken up journaling again (in no small part due to a nascent personal affection towards fountain pens) I’ve come to realize this: rarely are my writing skills truly put to the test. I don’t write correspondence, my emails are curt and whippish on the rare occasions I write them, and social media has killed the blog, the home of the amateur, and special interest, journalists: in the halcyon days in which I spent my formative years on the internet, there were dozens of hobbyist blogs on all manner of subjects, and now, look! Amidst the rubble of this all-encompassing Now, there are only Youtubers, Tiktokists, and Instagrammeurs… the humble blogger has been put to the sword by the marauding hordes whom demand instant gratification, and our — or at least, my — writing skills have suffered for it.

Because writing is exactly that: it’s a skill. We all learn it in our youth, we all refine it throughout the decades of our education, and then, seemingly, many of us forget how to go about it. I certainly have: I cannot write with the alacrity of vocabulary that I once possessed, not even remotely. My talents — if ever I possessed any, for I do not see myself fit to be compared to the great essayists whom I admire — have atrophied to the point of trivialities and pleasantries, and I feel the weight of the curse of disuse growing by the day, and it is time, I think, to say “no more.” No more will I stand idlely by and accept that this condition continues to wreck havoc on my ability to articulate and express myself, to actually state with clarity what I mean to say. I’ll not stand for it.

What do I plan on writing about? I don’t really know. Nothing. Everything: not that this will be the Seinfeld of web journals (I lack something in the way of witticisms to that end) but rather, that I want to write about any of my varied interests: I seem to pick up fascinations like head lice. One month it may be the New Yorker in the early part of the 20th century; another it may be Transformers figures; another it may be a return to classical music, or fountain pens, or the construction of wargames, or perhaps I will revisit mecha anime and manga. I simply do not know. But I promise, I will write about it. If it has fascinated me, it will be recorded here.

Why this format rather than anything else? I don’t know, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t amuse me. It is antiquated in its way: I don’t want to tweet or repost or whatever, I just want to spit up my thoughts and have them recorded somewhere: it’s of little import to me whether they be read or not. You are welcome to, of course, but ultimately I wanted to strip this down to the barest essence of what a blog is: a ‘web-log’, not hidebound to interaction, statistics, or whatever else may titillate the synapses, but simply to express the joy of writing and reading, to practice my skills, and to give me a record that eventually, I, or whoever else might be interested, might be able to refer back to.

I’ll write again soon.