Fashionably late to the blog party

Blog. Why? There are plenty already in existence and, in fact, several of my good friends are currently weaving their threads into the world wide web in a far more useful way than I'm capable of. So I've decided to write one for no reason, and without any unifying theme or cohesive structure, or at least without one that occupies my conscious mind. I'm fairly sure some people might tell you that this mirrors my attitude to conversation. 

You see, I have always wished I was the kind of person who rationed out his pearls a little more conservatively. A man who, without affectation, conducts himself with an air of enigmatic quietude tantalising enough to lull those around him into hushed anticipation of the next enlightening hit. Unfortunately, I can't help myself. My verbiage amounts to the conversational equivalent of emptying my dustbin on someone else's lawn. 

I quite regularly find myself painted into an anecdotal corner, where suddenly the name or theme that inspired me to pipe up in the first place, evaporates. I'm fairly sure that I have all kinds of cultural or philosophical opinions that queue up behind my brow waiting to be despatched like paratroopers into a conversation, only to find that upon pulling the cord, they release a cartoonish stream of packed lunches rather than parachutes. Names, in particular, escape me. I can get almost all the way through a repost that was inspired by and pivots entirely on the identity of some writer, actor, musician or director, to find myself alone and blethering in the gap where their name should be. How can anyone take my contribution seriously, when all I can muster is "well, I think, like a lot of early 20th century American writers, he owes a lot of his rather choppy style, to... thingy, you know the one who wrote that book. A contemporary of that other guy". I kill conversations.

I've attended countless seminars pertaining to communication many of which have expounded the virtues of taking a breath and thinking before answering a question in order to give a calm and considered response - a tactic I have most certainly intended to employ. In reality, however, my proclivity lies more towards expressing myself almost always without thinking, often before breathing and sometimes even during a breath, resulting in all kinds of spluttered, wheezing nonsense. You see, I'm in an awful hurry. I have no real idea where I'm going, in fact, I'm not even sure if I'm going anywhere at all, but I just know I need to keep going, to keep processing.

This blog, then, is perhaps an attempt to slow the verbal spillage from my mouth and arrange in in front of myself, much as one would arrange Scrabble tiles, in the hope that I can divine some meaning from it. So, please just go about your browsing while I tidy up this mess.