Merci beaucoup, Messieur Camus

NaBloPoMo, (National Blog Posting Month) is an on-line organization which promotes the discipline of posting a blog every day of the month. A suggested but not mandatory theme is announced and the participants begin the exercise. They begin with a widget that says they are participating and end with one that says "I did it" to decorate the blog. Many people achieve their goals, indeed they manage it consistently month after month. It is a noble idea and one I have tried to achieve and have even suceeded with twice since last November. It is kind of fun challenging myself to write 30 essays on the same theme word and see how many different directions I can go. The best part is reading comments when folks get a kick out of what I come up with. But the fun stops when it begins to become a chore.

I first began this endeavor at the suggestion of Jaimie Hall Bruzenak, a person I always thought of as my friend and sometimes mentor. Okay, okay, she still is, but Jaimie has a lot more stick-to-it-tiv-ness than me. And even she doesn't blog every day! While I may try to take her up on another suggestion sometime soon, today I am officially giving up this particularly frustrating pursuit of words for the sake of deadlines.

I am not a quitter! I have simply decided that there is some Cosmic Force out there that has possibly read my blogs and realized, as I have, that the ones worth reading are not the ones I write while waiting for the last stroke of midnight to sound on my digital clock. To this end, my Mystical Muse, Joan, who in life never was shy at telling me when I was not writing well, has found ways to signal me when it's time to do something else. This summer she's outdone herself!

But her latest ploy effected not only me and my August quest of 30 "Tomorrow" blogs but everyone here in the RV park. In one of the only real storms of this monsoon season, about an hour after I posted my last entry, she convinced the Monsoon FX department to direct a lightning bolt right into the park and fry the main Wi Fi tower and the entire system! We just got a reasonably strong signal back today.

In The Myth of Sisyphus written in 1942, Albert Camus "introduces his philosophy of the absurd: man's futile search for meaning, unity and clarity in the face of an unintelligible world devoid of God and eternal truths or values..... The final chapter compares the absurdity of man's life with the situation of Sisyphus, a figure of Greek mythology who was condemned to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a rock up a mountain, only to see it roll down again." Thanks to Wikipedia for this info.

I've begun to think that writing to order and writing even minimally well is an example of absurdity -for me. Other, much better writers seem to thrive on this exercise and I applaud them for it and read many of their blogs. I, need to think, and stew, and discard far too long to make real ideas come alive. I find myself stressing over a 500 word post that's not really what I'd like to be writing about. Then I realize that once again I have discovered the perfect tool for procrastinating. By the time I've finished the blog, I've run out of time for writing anything else. And so I've joined my Greek cousin Sisyphus in an absurd amount of frustration.

Camus's essay concludes,

"The struggle itself...is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."Okay Sisyphus, this is me happy, what about you?

I may try the challenge again someday-after all they give away prizes in November- but for the time being I think I'm going to stick to having fun and being happy and posting a blog when I have something to say.

See ya down the road,
Yarntangler