I have no familiarity with the Twilight books and movies of recent American popular culture. Although this is magical.
Rather these are thoughts and writings from my own twilight. And the twilight of my family. And quite possibly, the twilight of my country and of civilization itself.
There are advantages. By the time we reach twilight, we can draw on knowledge and experience and wisdom absent in our youth. And kindness and grace that were inadequate in our youth. We can find pleasure sharing all of these with others.
Hopefully by twilight, we have conquered our demons, whatever they may have been and however they were foisted upon us.
Our shadows dissolve in twilight.
Our shadows dissolve in twilight.
About this blog
Now, what am I going to write about here? Well, I mostly want an outlet to write about whatever is on my mind. So I will not limit these posts to any set topic or topics. It really is more like a journal. The fact that it is online means that people can read along. Or not.
I am not a natural writer, whatever that may mean. I often write to help me determine how I should think about things. Even sometimes, if I should think about things at all. So if others read along, great. It is a bonus. But the writing you find here is primarily for myself.
This is not my first blogging effort. And I intend to use the lessons I learned from my previous blogs here. For instance, to maximize readability, I want a clean and uncluttered presentation. As much as possible, I want the reader experience (even if I am the only reader) to be like reading a sheet of paper. We are here to think about things; not to be distracted with all too common internet commotion.
Update (June 2024)
Google, in its wisdom, has decided that this blog does not merit inclusion in its index. Even if you type a complete URL into Google's search bar, they cannot seem to find it. Even though Google owns this platform. So where in the beginning, this blog would receive random readers, today that number is practically zero. I get a few, very few, from DuckDuckGo and Bing. But the reality is that I only get readers if I send a link to someone. And I almost never do that. It's not that I don't want readers; it's just that the primary purpose of the writing here is for myself. And I rarely think, Hey, I should send that to whoever or wherever.
To be sure, I am grateful to Google for providing this platform. But I wish they were as committed to viewpoint diversity as they are to technical excellence.
I have explored other platforms, most notably Substack. But there are two problems with this. One, Google is just as likely to omit a Substack from their index as a blog on their own system. And two, all Substacks look the same. I was not able to craft a unique presentation. And as I explained above, the presentation is important. I have been on the Google Blogger system for over fifteen years now and the learning curve has been high. But I am extremely happy with the results.
The only thing that would drive me away from Blogger is if Google were to take down one or more of my posts. Given Google's politics and the tendency of the left to complain about views they disagree with, this is entirely possible. This was the primary reason I gave Substack a test drive. So Substack is my backup plan if necessary. Let's hope it does not come to that.
One other change I have made is that I have separated certain types of posts from the main Writings timeline. It's not that these are less important. I just find some posts don't really mesh together well. For instance, when I'm writing about politics, I just find a music post kind of distracting and out of place. So I moved Music and several other categories into their own Collections. Find these at the top of the sidebar.
In any case, if you've found this blog, somehow, welcome.