Natural History

I’ve been scribbling away at this space for over a decade. Ten years ago, I was cocksure and dumb, and those two things are never a good match. I am amazed that anyone read that stuff I wrote back then. I was so full of crap, and my style was all edgelord and lilting.

I am not the same person now. I’ve had my successes and my failures. I’ve moved on, and I’ve taken leaps of faith that led me to different avenues, different perspective, different ideas.

I wish to God that I’d had the foresight to give this blog a better URL. It is so derivative that I almost shock myself at my naivete and utter lack of imagination. I named in the vein of hero worship, but I don’t have the same heroes now that I did back then.

I have come to hate much of my prose, even now when I’ve mostly found my voice and style. I’m profoundly insecure about what I write, and I must confess that I always was. Even when I wrote with the faux authority of an angry young man, I never felt that I was writing anything good.

I always felt a bit of fraud. I could write things so clearly that I made this weird illusion that I knew things I simply did not know. But as you get older, you learn what a damned fool you were.

I hate the way I write now more than ever. I write here mainly so I might cast off these ugly bugs that devour my syntax. It is a vain ritual, for I know sI will always write the way I do– and I don’t really like it.

So I will plunk away on this keyboard. Maybe you’ll like it, but I will always doubt.

I’m a doubter by nature. I no longer can write the pithy things that made this sort of blog get attention ten years ago. I no longer feel that that is my current purpose.

I don’t know what it is now, except to analyze out what I think the current science of dogs and their kin is and then maybe paint some pictures with words.

“Paint some pictures with words”? I can’t believe I wrote such a cliche!

Damn these bugs.

I’m so isolated from others writing blogging about these topics now that I sometimes feel that I’m just shooting out a load of nonsense that no one can follow or care about.

I suppose those of us who perform with written words feel these insecurities and sometimes become swamped with doubt.

It’s a hard business, especially when you feel so over-matched no matter what you do. But I stand where the rivers of fate have flushed me.

I stand as a writer. Nothing more. Nothing less. Without significance or favor, but without entirely losing faith in it all.