Not Sure Where This Is GOING?

Not sure where this is GOING?

Me neither, sometimes.

In some ways, I am hampered by my blog's title, "A Better Nation," even though that title and theme also gives me focus, and boy do I need some focus.

I've kinda got that ADD thing going, whether or not it's a real "disorder" or not. And how's that for irony? A disorder about disorder.

I've never owned a TV, 'cause really I'd be addicted to it, and I wouldn't have as much time to haphazardly squander my time in other ways, like watching the dust collect on the window sill. And my haunted house does have more than the usual number of spider webs. Ah, the nooks and crannies of this beat up old homestead somehow resemble the mind of it's lone (or is that no so "lone"?) inhabitant? Ok, lone human inhabitant, except for the ghosts. (It's my grandparents' old house. They last lived here in 1970 and 1991, respectively. My grandmother's old sequined and gauze-shrouded hats and dresses from the 50s are in the cedar closet. My grandfather's white tux with black trim, now slightly tarnished with age, still hangs in its dry cleaner's bag in "his" closet.)

So life goes on at different levels. Our levels tend to be multifarious - what some might call "scattered" or even "prone to attention deficit" - if we are acutely sensitive or aware or contemplative or sentimental or curious or ambitious people. And that's whether we've got good focus or not.

I do think there's a shared reality out there - and in here, no matter how small or big the view. We often mistake "Reality," as things are, capital R, objective Reality, with our individual perceptions of reality. Sure, our perceptions are varied. Each of us is unique, just like everyone else.

In other words, we share many things in common, including the same star dust that is the stuff of everything we see, even our own bodies. But we skew things, too. Makes us fascinating AND infuriating, determined to be hopeful and so often it seems, bound to a hopeless ball and chain, crude and curious.

So where is this going? With so many days to come, it will be a portrait of two things I keep both eyes on, with some hope: my country and myself. You get the view from here, harping on the negative lately? Maybe. Maybe that's a strange way to push for hope. There must be some deep desire to write so much about one's self and one's surroundings, interior and exterior.

For now, thanks for coming along for the ride.

Time to blow out some cobwebs and get outside, get moving, get back into the sweltering swing and, by afternoon, reptilian rest of these summer days, this summer daze.