A Missive From The Middle Most Of Average

A friend suggested to me recently, to set aside an ungodly early hour in the morning and dedicate it to the act of writing. Six a.m. doesn’t exactly qualify as ‘ungodly early’, but I’ve found myself awake at this hour with some regularity, so I’ve decided to make the ‘most’ of it and use it for that purpose…to get back into the habit of writing with some consistency. Welcome to day one – the icebreaker.

Unlike many of the finger-bangers out there that inhabit the blogosphere and flood Twitter and the other ‘social networking’ services out there, I just can’t get into the idea of sitting in front of the screen with cable news on another screen ranting and raving and shooting out reactionary quips on the hysteria of the day – the economy, celebrity, disasters, wars, social movements…yammer-yammer-blather-clatter-blah-blah-blah, don’t worry call the cacophony man on that noise…nor am I interested in describing (and I’m fairly certain that you aren’t, either) about what’s for dinner, what venue I’m wandering for a new pair of shoes, or what cute little stunt my cat just pulled.

There is a chunk of me that misses the earliest incarnation of this electronic notebook – the colorful and obscene rantings and ravings of an inebriant with a head full of thunder. The time for that has passed. It served it’s purpose, and I just don’t really have that much of that in me any longer. It was fun, but it doesn’t really get anyone anywhere. I’d like to think that the words, the writing can now be used to tell a more complete and coherent narrative. I’ve been looking for a direction, an angle, a voice other than that which Monkeyeggs started with for a couple of years now; the site went through a couple of revisions, went dormant for a stretch, I started poking at it again…then I stumbled on something…

 I was doing some demographic research on the neighborhood and made a discovery of sorts. That our neighborhood and this household is about as average and middle of the road, the very definition of ‘median’ for the city, the state and the nation. It just doesn’t get much more average than this. This turned on the little cartoon light bulb over my head – that THAT is the angle, the perspective, the voice in which these little missives emanate from – the middle most of average. I gotta say, it’s not a bad place to be. The middle most of average is the last place I ever expected to find myself, I’d always envisioned far lesser. Logic could-have-would-have-should-have demanded it. When one has drank and smoked and run with women of questionable virtue to the degree that I have, the future is usually a much bleaker place – or so I’ve always been told by those older and wiser than I.

So what’s the point? Why type from the perspective of the middle most of average? Well, I’ve been having these conversations with a co-worker recently. A co-worker who, like many others out there is convinced that the world is on an irreversible flaming downward spiral and that the future holds nothing but chaos and doom and gloom and destruction…whereas I’m not so sure of that. Is it all rainbows and unicorns? No, but it’s not all as dismal and dour as it’s cracked up to be either. I’d like to make the case here for a measured approach to the angst’s of the day – an approach that I like to call, “Belligerent Optimism”.  What is “Belligerent Optimism”? Well, that’s a topic for the next post, as I have just reached the one hour mark for this morning…