My Blog Manifesto-Part II

“Know thyself.” Socrates

Ok, if you read my Blog Manifesto-Part I, you know what my technical parameters are for this blog(ugh!) Given my tendency to be verbose, I’m already finding keeping my essays around 750 words will be more of a challenge than I expected.

In this second part of my Manifesto I will give you some insight into where I’m coming from and what makes me think I can write anything you might want to hear. I guess perhaps maybe the whole idea is to write for oneself but if you notice I’m kind of iffy on that point. I feel that I have the soul of a writer but also the heart of a life-long salesman and marketer and absent a consistent muse, I have to think in terms of whom my marketable audience is and what I can draw from that will make you want to buy what I’m selling, so to speak.

The first one’s easy, my target audience is those that are forty-plus, like me, or those that are fast approaching forty and even some of you that have encroached upon your fifties (By the way, as I rapidly approach that number, screw fifty being the new forty; come see me when fifty is the new thirty.)Secondly, I’m looking for a kinship in what I write; I’m seeking to explain the unexplainable sometimes in terms that might make you say, “Yep, I know just what he feels like…”

At times my urge to write feels like Peter Keating coming too late to the discipline of self-belief and trueness to one’s inner rhythm and calling. I’ve come to embrace this calling, for lack of a better term, not through the pompous bromide I suffer to share but rather I share to stay sane…

Also, how can I define myself in this brief introduction that will place me in the right age range but also identify me as a kindred spirit of this odd half-generation we share that seems to make up the fence I straddle on so many issues and technologies.

For starters, I never had to get under a desk for a bomb drill in class but I was among the first group of eighteen-year-olds that had to register for the draft since the Vietnam War as our country planned for fighting the indefinable Cold-war. That also means I have picture albums full of bell-bottom pants, leisure suits and large bow ties and prom pictures with ruffled shirts.

I bill myself as the Gregster, a bon vivant, a Student of Human Nature and perhaps most telling in regard to the extent of my humility, as The Guy Who Knows a Little About a Lot. That’s the best way I can characterize the amalgam of information I have picked up over the years of being a people-watcher, reading the newspaper voraciously and watching way too much TV.

Now that I finally feel like I have something to share, I do find it hilariously coincidental that one of the two classes I dropped in college was English and it was mainly because I later realized I didn’t have the discipline or the depth of experience necessary to write even the most basic term paper or essay at that time.

I guess what I’m selling in the end is that life is hard and complicated and sometimes seemingly unbearable but if it weren’t for other people. People that you don’t even know; people that may save your life one day; people that remind you that you’re not alone…when you feel like you’re alone…

So that’s my manifesto, much Like Charles Foster Kane’s Declaration of Principles it’s full of hope and grandiosity. It’s an emotional business plan, if you will, for sharing my thoughts, confusion and yes, principles, on a wide range of subjects in a pretentious and self-indulgent manner that only cyberspace can provide.

Oh, and If you know what book Peter Keating is a character in and if you know what movie Charles Foster Kane dominates then we’ll get along just fine…and you’ll also know what my favorite book and movie are…

Next Up-My First Web Essay; Flotsam