Pardon the mess while I’m moving in . . .

Starting a blog is a lot like moving into a new place -- nothing that you have right now is quite how you envision it looking in the future. You need to get your stuff out of the boxes (and you know it’s going to take months, if not years, to get everything out of the boxes), some of your stuff got broken in the move, you’ll probably want to buy new furniture anyway, and my God, isn’t this place bare and empty? Quick, buy some crappy ArtWork™ from Cost Plus, just to cover up the walls!

So it is with my new blog, created factory fresh from the wonderful people who design Blogger’s default templates.

Nothing yet is quite where I want it to be. Do I like the bare, blank white page, or should I go with color? What fonts do I like? How the hell do you format this thing so it looks halfways decent? My, but that’s an unpleasant picture of me.

Moving is the metaphor that springs first to mind, because I just moved in to a new place. Actually, I’ve been there a month, but I still haven’t put anything in order. Books are still in boxes, clothes are unsorted, the Internet connection is flaky --I’ve spotted several little home improvement projects I want to do, but right now I don’t have the time to do them.

It takes time to settle into any new situation, and right now my life is nothing but new situations. In less than six months, I’ve turned my life completely upside down -- different job, different house, no girlfriend.

That much change in so short a time is a mite disorienting. In our relentlessly, compulsorily positive culture, I know you’re supposed to embrace every change as a liberating new experience, an opportunity to improve yourself, a new beginning, bloppety bloppety bloppety blah.

Yeah, all that’s true enough -- actually, I believe all that crap to a frightening extent. (Starting this blog is just one of the several self-improvement/self-promotion schemes I’m embracing with all the fervor of a Baptist in cold water.)

But that always-look-on-the-bright-side-of-life ideology looks only at the potential long-term benefits from dramatic change while ignoring the actual short-term disruption it causes.

I had this notion that changing my life would free me. But liberation is a tricky concept. To be free of something is to remove it from your life. If you remove enough things from your life … your life gets empty. Or at least devoid of familiar signposts.

Freedom begins in nothingness, Sartre says -- a creative nothingness, in which the conscious mind uses its power of negation to conceive of something other than that-which-is. Freedom and creation begin by denying that the existing situation is all that can exist.

Hope is pleasant, so we look at the positive side of the equation: destruction begets freedom begets creation. Without ever denying the value of hope, I suggest we shouldn't let hope distract us from the corollary -- creation implies freedom, and freedom implies destruction.

So is it a good thing to face a blank page, to live in a barely-moved-into house, to lead a drastically simplified life? It is what it is, and I don't know if there's much value to holding an opinion about it.

As a wise man told me, this is a dark time. Embrace the darkness.

Yours from the void,
Jaguar