Paint by Letters

Well it has happened. I am now officially and fully initiated as a member of Blogger.

Upon completion of my post regarding a personal road rage adventure, I read my piece, spell checked and edited, gave the final draft the once over then proudly clicked “Publish Post.” Almost immediately, I was taken to a page that told me to sign in first. I was quite surprised as this had never happened before and I was fully expecting to wait out the usual fifteen seconds or so while watching my work get published. I suppose I had broken some unwritten rule about being idle for too long a time before publishing, and they were prompting me to sign in again; pissed me off, but fine. I signed in and to my horror was taken to a blank page. My post was nowhere!

Even my cats covered their ears as I let loose a string of both single- and multi-syllabic words that you don’t say to your boss or mother. While I feverishly clicked every key on my keyboard and every button on the blog site in hopes of reclaiming my creation, my heart began to sink. The post was gone forever.

My knee-jerk reaction would have been to shut down the computer and walk into greener pastures for a while to cool down. Greener pastures in this case would have been my living room ~ preferably clutching a gallon of ice cream in one hand and a bottle of valium in the other. Since the house was devoid of ice cream and I’m too much of a control freak to down pills, I opted to open my WP program, engage my memory and rewrite my post. It sucked and it just wasn't the same, but I got it done.

I’m thinking though, considering the fact that the second post ended up about five paragraphs shorter than the initial one and was only lacking some minor details, I should, from now on, purposefully erase everything I write the first time around and rewrite it ~ if only to save space.

Truly though, this pained me so. It’s not that I so highly value each word published on my blog, it’s more in knowing that I cannot reproduce the stuff once it’s gone forever. Joni Mitchell once prefaced a song by chuckling at her audience and explaining how much she enjoys their chanting out different song requests before a performance. She said the difference between the performing arts and painting, for example, is that a painter will do a painting and either it sits in some loft somewhere or somebody buys it ~ but nobody ever yelled out to Van Gogh “hey paint a Starry Night again, man!”

I find that writing is like painting. You start with a blank page (canvas) and with every keystroke (brush stroke) you create a work of art. Some might think it’s rich and lovely and others may find it ugly or offensive. But it cannot be repeated – not word for word. Not without some sort of outside technology which, yesterday, I had not employed.

But now I ramble … in this case, a product of frustration and angst. In any case, I suppose a lesson hard-learned always has a silver lining. I won’t be creating any more posts in the Blogger WP program. I just hope this is the end of my initiation and there are no other surprises in store.