Happy Day of the Dead!

That's what I said to myself this morning after drinking three tall bourbon and cokes last night and eating fifteen packs of Whoppers, stolen from my children.

I also remembered it is day one of NaBloPoMo, or National Blog Posting Month, a derivative of NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. During National Novel Writing Month, writers are challenged to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. In the blogging version, we are challenged to post daily through the month of November. Just to further drive home the point that bloggers are several steps below pulp fiction hacks in the literary food chain. We ride the short bus.

My initial reaction to NaBloPoMo was Na. But one by one the rest of the Sweathogs eagerly jumped off the bridge. I thought it would be cool and non-conformist of me to declare NoBloPoMo, a month of abstinence from posting. But truth be told, I have never been that cool or non-conforming. If all the rest of the kids are doing it, I'm in, baby.

What clinched it is that my perfectionism has been creeping into my blogging of late. The P-word is my creative block of choice, and before now, the blog has been a great antidote. Because, face it, it's hard to put on airs and use the word blog at the same time.

It's true that I do like to write meatier posts. And this is the petri dish for much of my "real" writing. But I stumbled into blogging in the first place precisely because of the lower expectations attached to it. I set up a travel blog the summer before last just as a means of keeping in touch with friends during a month-long trip to Newfoundland. I was amazed at how much I wanted to say once I started typing. I was amazed that I enjoyed it. Writing had always been a grind, a discipline, the thing I should be doing, "If only you would apply yourself." I got that speech from every teacher I ever had after grade school. Let's not even go into the stuff about my father being a writer. (If you care to, you can visit my poetry blog where I am in the process of excavating some of those abcesses.)

Baggage, laden down with Expectations. That's what I was lugging around the departures terminal. Somehow the blog set the conveyor belt in motion and I was able to put it down and catch my plane.

I don't want to lose that. I've been working real hard at the so-called real writing recently, and it's making me rather earnest and dull. I want to keep it loose, lighten up. I want to play.

So count me in. There's no way I can even pretend to write something really good or meaningful or smart every single day. This will be an exercise in letting go of good or meaningful or smart. I'm just playing scales here everyday in November, not composing symphonies.

As a first warm-up exercise, I will now let go of my need to finish with a nice, round closing paragraph that brings it all home. It's already killing me.

But I will jump instead to this non-sequitur.

Celebrated Halloween last night with my good friends Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, at a surprise Fleetwood Mac reunion gig. All the beautiful people were there. Check it out:



The rest of the photos, many of them in focus, are up on Flickr.
See you tomorrow.

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