Maybe I should just title every post "Random Thoughts for the Day". I hesitate to even start another blog. I'm not keeping up all that well with the 365 blog I have, nor in encouraging my fellow 365ers. But when I look at the general scheme of my life and what I want to accomplish, I think I'd rather work on writing than photography. The photography is helping me to see life in a new way, so maybe that will help my writing.

Part of my difficulty in writing a blog is at I'm not exactly sure what a blog is. It's not really a journal, because I won't be confiding here as I would in a journal. It's not first thoughts. I will be self-editing. Is it for me or for an audience? Kind of a combination, I think. It's for me for sure. And an audience... well, I'm not sure who will want to read the random and sometimes not quite coherent and sometimes didactic thoughts of mine.

Maybe it's like a newspaper column, one where I record my observations and thoughts, the ones I allow for public consumption. I want it to be honest. There's a woman, a writer for our local newspaper, who has colon cancer. She is writing a column for the paper, one that's been going on for about a year now, about what it's like to be a cancer patient. She says that her husband told her to be honest or it won't be worth anything. So I think she's being honest. But I'm sure the agony she's gone through isn't there. At least, as I read her column, it doesn't seem to be. I'm sure that the column is like the ripples and first few inches of a lake... yes, they show what's really there, but they're just what's there on the surface. Those of us who live in the world of air are not really experiencing it. We are outside observers. Just so for this columnist.

No matter how much we try to enter the skin of someone else, we can't. I am struck so often by how isolated we are here in these houses of flesh.