If someone can write a beautiful poem about a lemon*, shouldn’t a blogger be able to write decent posts about pretty much anything?

I have been engaged in a back-and-forth email exchange with a person who is supremely skeptical of blogs and blogging in general. I am getting the sense that she regards these posts as serious attempts to put ourselves out there for you, the readers and sometimes (oftentimes? just about always?) she finds them … lacking. And I don’t mean only here at Ocean, though Ocean I am sure also does not measure up. One of her (numerous) claims is that, being a daily event, a blog (like this one) has to be boring, because how many of us have interesting ideas to put out like this on such a regular basis?

Oh dear. It has never struck me that people are basically a dull lot. That we move through the day robotically, that our brains work hard just to keep us afloat as we navigate life’s hurdles. And that at the end of the day, we are spent. And if we then sit down to blog, we spit out garbage, exhausted and bereft of any creative juice (which, if we have any to begin with, has been expanded elsewhere, in some other fashion).

And so here we are, us motley crew of bloggers, forced to put down something, anything, and make a story of it, even where there is no story, nothing worth pasting into the blog, just endless simplistic worries or observations for you to waste time reading when you should be working or talking to people.

I have great faith. I truly believe that if we wanted to devote the entire day and every day to writing, we could flush out limitless numbers of ideas. Take that, you blog-doubting Thomas! If posts are bland and blogs are sloppy, they are that way not because people lack the juice to make something more of them but because, for whatever reason, they choose not to make it a finer expression. You can sketch ambitiously or you can just doodle on a piece of paper. So, too, on a blog. And in this world, there's enough space and time for both the doodlers and the artists and the vast majority that is nestled somewhere in between, to do their thing.

* ...a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a nipple
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet.

What are friends for if not to humor you…

You know you’re taken seriously when you post something about wanting to cap each day with a latte and your friend is on her way now as we speak, to drop over, just for that cup of coffee with you. Especially if that friend lives in St. Paul.

This friend is also the one who bought the condo from us when we couldn’t otherwise sell it (as I wrote in an earlier post), probably out of pity and not wanting us to be forever stuck raising a family in closet-like conditions.

And here’s another thing: she went along just to pretest the region of Brittany, France in the year that I had my food tours to France up and running and needed someone to scoot around the northern provinces with me. She even let me drag her to a farm where the woman made fresh camembert from Brittany milk. Predictably, she bought a couple of the cheeses even though she was traveling around after leaving France and couldn’t take them with her. Of course, she then gave them to me.

You don’t all have to go that far to take care of me. But if someday you’re residing at great distances and I say, man I would love company for a latte, follow her impulse. It can lift a soul up up up to have that spontaneous cup, out of nowhere.

speed

You haven't lived until you took the bumps on Mineral Point close to midnight on Mr. B, with only a Cateye to guide you along.

On the other hand, if I do that again, I may not live either. Next night ride: it'll have to be the South West bike path. Mr. B deserves to keep his heart at a steady pace. He's too old for this sort of thing.

Me, I'm scratched from the branches I knocked against in the block I decided to do via the sidewalk. Bloody hell (and bloody arm). People: cut your timber already if it overhangs public spaces!