Bowing to Insta-culture.

Something I wish to avoid with this particular online journal  is the requisite narcissism and ego-maintenance that accompany the very few non-professional 'blogs' I actually waste my time reading.

I tend to be long-winded and self-important in other places on the web, so I promise you -that would be any human being (sorry webcrawlers) who should be unfortunate enough to fall into this depraved corner of the virtual world - that I will attempt to maintain the humility with which I have been impressed since birth. Which of course on the face of it seems to be contradictory to the nature of online journals.

Why do we keep private journals or diaries? So we can look back on ourselves years later and see how immature, completely backward and hubristic we were, ergo we put them online so we can let everyone else know how immature, completely backward and hubristic we are RIGHT NOW!

Well, I already know all that stuff, so why let everyone else in on the secret? To that end, I plan not to engage in the proverbial puffing of the chest, the posting of the glamour shots, the outlining of the minutia that is the excrement of my life.

I will not pretend to be smarter, more important, ultra-clever or more beautiful than I actually am. With this comes one caveat: I may at times completely amaze myself, which will be noted here and would be noted in ANY private journal or diary anyway. i.e. AH was starting to smell like caca, then I realized I had not flushed her for three weeks. *ZING*

"Jim," you may ask, "if you are not so awesome as to need a place to advertise yourself, WTF man?"

In the interest of dissemination of information and a perspective thereon, I hereby claim this web address for ALL MANKIND to serve as a portal to... (oh, see! there is the hubris!)

Where does the word 'blog' come from? Interestingly enough the OED does not have a definition for the word 'blog', but it does have one of my favorite words, LYPEMANIA. Is blog not more mundane than LYPEMANIA? According to Internet references it is a short for web log. Which gets compounded to weblog. But then there are two letters removed, which gives you a contraction absent the apostrophe. So, it should be written as 'blog, but we omit the apostrophe due to the lack of the general public knowing anything about the English language anymore? (or anymo') I see the word til used very often without its requisite apostrophe. 

I may use the form 'blog here just to piss you off. Yes, Jennifer Thompson, YOU! The word apparently originates on the web in 1994, but not in conjunction with 'web log'. Probably talking about someone's huge dump they took at Burning Man.

"Dudeski... I fukkking just blogged up that porta-squattie!"

"No way, broski!?"

"Way, broooo! Is it the mushrooms, or did my dick just fall off?"

So, where was I? Oh yes. I wish to chronicle my personal journey about the country in my motorhome. I could do it on paper, but my wrist would hurt after 20 minutes, and I script like shit. I could do it on my laptop and keep it personal, but inevitably (already in fact) I would be asked how the trip was going, post or send some pics, etc. This solves many problems at once.

Oh yes, the name! Having been asked about the name of my coach, I decided on a two-name approach. Her first name is Althea, after the Grateful Dead song and her last name is Harvey, which is cool because it has RV in it, and it is a cool name besides. If I get really pissed at her or need her undivided attention, I may even toss 'III' on the end.

"Althea Harvey the IIIrd, you get your ass up that hill or I will sell you to the fucking Gypsies! I serious!"

So, yeah... I'll try to approach this whole thing with a healthy dose of humility. Be like Buddha... be Buddha.