Yes I will continue to coddiwomple for a while. On my birthday in November of 2014, after retiring in May, I decided I would do a blog post every single day for at least a year. Now, eleven years and ten months later, I am still posting every single day that I possibly can. I think that I shall continue for a while because there are real benefits to doing so.
- It keeps my seriously old and worn-out brain active, chugging along even though it is held together with mental duct tape.
- It challenges my ability to come up with new ideas. I admit, sometimes I sit down to write a post with nothing in my head but random snippets of music and empty space. Yet, I have managed to increasingly create bizarre and exotic thought-artifacts at an increasingly volatile pace. Perhaps soon the ideas reach critical mass, and my writing goes boom like a series of fireworks.
- It has increased my visibility on WordPress and the reach of my writing through social media.
- It has taught me how much I hate Twitter. People tweeting in a rage at each other makes the world a birdhouse full of angry birds.
- It has also taught me to edit carefully and quickly because my writing time is theoretically limited, as is my target word count.
- And I have learned that some days I need to do a simple and easy post like this to give my mind-muscles a chance to rest and grow. Frequently, I get by through reposting old posts. I have a number of them that I really like.
So I will continue to post on WordPress, putting up pusillanimous Paffoonies to treat and entertain you. (Yes, I know that “pusillanimous” means timid. But the root words mean “small mind”, and my mind is nothing if not small. And I also needed a multi-syllabic p-word to make the alliteration sound funnier.)
But the thing about monster movies… at least the good ones, is that you can watch it to the end and see the monster defeated. We realize in the end that the monster never really wins. He can defeat the monstrous qualities within himself and stop himself. Or the antidote to what ails him is discovered (as Luke did with Darth Vader). Or we can see him put to his justifiable end and remember that if we should see those qualities within ourselves, we should do something about it so that we do not suffer the same fate. Or, better yet, we can learn to laugh at the monstrosity that is every-day life. Humor is a panacea for most of life’s ills.
