Stumbling Toward God?

I had a thought once that it would be amusing for The Purple Robe to have a self-titled EP with an actual song titled The Purple Robe; another song called Self-Titled EP; a third song called Title Track; and maybe one called Eponymous or something. Hilarious. That is not what this post is about.

I used to subscribe to a certain guitar magazine that always had “clever” article titles that I actually found quite annoying. To make up an example, there might be an article called, “Another Brick in the Wall”, and you get you get all in a Pink Floyd mood, when it turns out to be an interview with some guitarist named Johnny Wall, about whom you could not possibly care. Or whatever. It drove me crazy. Yet years later, I find myself with a blog where I am constantly catching myself wanting to title my posts with the same sort of puns and references. So now it drives me crazy that I want to do that.

In any case, lately I have been thinking about titles. A lot of that is due to the fact that I have actually been changing titles after posting recently. Last month I posted one of my [not even a little] famous movie reviews, except that I inadvertently titled it as a “Music Review…” As it happens, the prior post along with the following two were actually about music, and “music” and “movie” are kind of similar words, so it was perhaps an understandable mistake. It was up for a week or two before I noticed and corrected the error, so I suppose my most diligent readers had already noticed. If not, I left the permalink unaltered as a reminder of my foolishness.

I usually have a title in mind for a post when I come up with the topic, before I even start writing. However, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote the whole post, and then sat for some time trying to think what to call it. It was another post about dreams, and the first thing I happened to think of was “Bird Singing in the Sycamore Tree”, which (assuming that you are exactly as cultured as I am) you should recognize as a reference to dreams. Yet it just was not quite my style. So I decided instead on, “Who Am I to Disagree?”, which is another similar reference, if perhaps more cryptic. I was not totally satisfied with that, but I published it anyway. However, with that finished, I still had sycamore trees on my mind, so I went back to the source for that reference and discovered the “While I’m Alone and Blue as Can Be” line (again assuming that you are exactly as cultured as I am – you did not know about either) which was definitely my style. Unfortunately, I initially misquoted it as “[When] I’m Alone…” and thus, within minutes of initially posting, I changed the title and resulting link TWICE, but I figured that no one would have seen it yet.

Last week I went overboard on the geekiness. In some programming/engineering/logic contexts, “!” means “NOT [whatever comes afterward]“. For example, if X is TRUE then !X would be FALSE. So for that particular title, You have to ask yourself, “What is Sparta?” Then more specifically, “What is NOT Sparta?” That was a lot of work, no? [What do you think of THAT, Guitar World?]

As you may have noticed, I am quite fond of titles that start “In Which the Author…”, but I try to limit those so as not to lose the novelty. Other times I get stuck on a theme. I had no initial intention of having three “([Whatever] Edition!)” music posts, or three posts related to racism, or how for a while last summer two out of every three post titles inexplicably started with the letter ‘F’. I still do not know what that was about. It got to the point where I would come up with a post and title and have to tell myself, “I don’t care how perfect that title is, it starts with ‘F’ again. Change it.”

On the topic of what to call things, sometimes I come up with story ideas. (I never, you know, write them down, or anything like that of course.) Yet, in my head, I have to call the characters something, and I find it tricky to come up with names, because invariably I think of someone that I know or have known with that name, and I generally do not want that character to remind me of that person.

Last week, I had plenty of time to think as I was digging holes, and I came up with a new story (which is unlikely to go anywhere), and for some reason I settled on the name “Clara” for one of the characters. Then I immediately thought, What‽ No one has been named “Clara” in a hundred years. Which is obviously good for the someone-that-I-know issue, but not so great on the a-name-that-someone-would-actually-have criteria. However, this is the internet, and I discovered that after a dramatic fall off, “Clara” has actually been gaining in popularity over the last ten years. Which really left me wondering how exactly did I know that? (Incidentally, it seems that “Aiden” is among the top ten name for boys these days. Why would you name your kid that? That name screams, “Entitled punk who desperately needs to be slapped.”)

Lastly, back to the topic of post titles, how are you guys doing on this one? I even thought of another level since then that made me really wish I had attached it to a more meaningful post, but c’est la vie. Would it help if I mentioned that I had this song in my head when I first came up with it? Probably not.

I had several topics in mind to talk about this week, but I also had a busy week and I am pushing all of those ideas aside in the 11tth hour in favor of this one.

For some reason, at some point within the last few days I remembered that I once had a post entitled Swallow. I could not remember what the post itself was about, I only recalled that the title was essentially a random word completely unrelated to the topic that I never-the-less thought created an appropriate mood for what I was discussing.

“Swallow” can mean many things. Most commonly, after you chew, you swallow. It could also be a perhaps involuntary reaction when one suddenly becomes nervous. Metaphorically, it can mean to “suck it up”; your pride for instance. Unfortunately, I can not ignore that it also has a certain sexual connotation. Or maybe it refers to a kind of bird.

I can safely say that none of these were what I had in mind when I wrote it. To be perfectly honest, I believe that I was thinking of the Bush song Swallowed, which I also happen to have no idea of what it is about, because that dude simply does not enunciate well. However, it does have an overall bleak tone to it, which is really all that I was interested in at the time.

The important thing to remember is that it was a random word unrelated to the post topic. Also, thinking about it reminded me of a certain person, but I did not know why. It turns out that I actually mentioned that person in that post, though cryptically as always. So on some level, I guess I did remember what that post was about.

In what I was almost about to write when I sat down at my computer tonight, I was going to refer to the board game “Loaded Questions”, which I know that I have mentioned in the past. I searched the blog to find exactly where and what I had said previously, and surprisingly, that very post was the only result. (Although, I feel that I must have talked about the game elsewhere, but perhaps did not specifically mention by name.)

Curiously, earlier today I was thinking about how I never had an actual email signature, as in something that gets automatically appended to the end of each email sent, but I did used to have a certain sign off technique where I would end with some phrase with all the words run together with no spaces.  I do not remember how or why I started that, but I must have kept it up for a good ten years or so before one day I simply decided, “You know what, I don’t want to do that anymore.” However, I was thought it might be a fun throwback to end a blog post like that one of these days, you know, for the fans. Yet it turns out, I did that exact thing in that same damn post.

So it is either a massive multi-level coincidence, or there is something about that particular post that is weighing heavily on my subconscious. So I thought, what the heck, why don’t we all give it a read?

Speaking of post titles and coincidences, anyone else notice how many of my recent entries all begin with the letter ‘F’? Totally unintentional. I had already titled this post before I noticed. Weird.

Today is the seventh anniversary of my blog. An awful lot has changed in seven years. Some things have not.

It also happens to be Easter today, or “Resurrection Sunday”, if you prefer. Somewhat appropriate to “resurrect” my blog from its longest hiatus yet. Stumbling Toward God… I was talking with someone a little while ago about how that title was not really appropriate. I have not been blogging this year because I honestly do not have anything more to say on that topic. I am no closer to God than when I started seven years ago. I almost went to church one Sunday several weeks ago just because I was feeling so alone, but then I had to ask, “How exactly would that make me feel any LESS alone?” So I did not.

It has been a rotten year so far. I was tempted to call it the worst year that I have had in a while, but then I had to ask myself, “Really? Who died?” Well, no one that I know. So, generally speaking, that would make it a better year than 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, and oh, while we are at it, 2008? Jesus… Well okay, but this has been a bad year for *me*… nevermind.

Blogger has discontinued support for externally hosted blogs such as mine, and is requiring everyone to switch to their server. So I switched… to WordPress. It was not quite as smooth a transition as I had hoped for as I wanted the new blog to be installed into the same location as the previous one, and I also wanted all of the posts to have the same names as before, since I do a fair amount of back linking. (WordPress and Blogger use different conventions to generate Permalinks.) I believe I have that all sorted out now. Another problem is that most of the old comments did not make the transition. The importer actually stated, “60/247 comments imported”, without any explanation as to why it could not be bothered with the other 187, so I do not know what, if anything, to do about that yet. I am not totally happy with this current layout and “theme” either, but I did not want to spend all day on that.

Long time fans might recall that this is actually the THIRD implementation of this blog, and I have joined all of the posts from both prior versions into a single archive. What fun. I also started to categorize the old posts, which actually was a feature that Blogger added after I had already been blogging for awhile and I never bothered to implement. I did not get terribly far in that effort, because reading through the archives made really me want a stiff drink. And a gun. Whatever else might be said, my search for God has… not been rewarding.

I was thinking about how I have been blogging pretty much since the day I first heard the word “blog” six years ago. Most of that time I have been bothered by the feeling that I was not posting quite often enough, but I actually did the math and it averages out to about one post every ten days, which I know is hardly awarding-winning , but I am still rather impressed with myself. Not that it matters. I read not long ago about how the kids are really into the “social media” these days, but it is mostly only people over 30 who blog anymore. Which sadly, is about the only instance that I can come up with of me actually acting my age. I really do not know if “mommy blogging” is still popular, as that simply is not my scene.

In any case, here we are, with a blog rebuilt from the ground up, ready to stumble on.