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The Blurried Musings Trashbin

This blog is not like most other blogs. I don’t post a flurry of brief but brilliant thoughts off the cuff (with links and everything!). I’ve had such weblogs, and no doubt always will. Blurried Musings isn’t like that. I post just one article a day, and take time to think over the topic of each piece. That may be as little as 30 seconds, and the final product may feel rushed and lack coherence — when something ties together, consider it an accident. Still, I treat what I place here as a professional creation. This doesn’t make what you find on here special, just not common stuff for a blog.

Working it this way forces me to note down thoughts for future entries. Part of the duties in a former job required me to play an idea generator and I fake it well; but a fuel tank runs dry eventually, and keeping a spreadsheet of pre-cooked notions helps get something up here every day. Often there’s only a title, which may be enough to indicate what I was going for. It doesn’t hurt when a few lines popped up to go with it, or I set down an explanatory paragraph so I later know what was flopping around in my head. My ideas can require lots of explanation. The problem is, many end up trashed or untouched because I’m not able to take it past that initial foot in the door stage, or fail to see what interest I had on its first go around. Once in a while I’m unable to find a humorous way to write about it. The ultimate death knell here.

So I’m left with these limping abstracts I’d like to but can’t put to use, as they refuse to form into complete, servicable compositions. It’s probably best for me to forget them, leave them as they are and move on to something that actually leads to a full Blurried Musings submission. You’d be right to expect this, but sadly, that’s not the way I work…

One is called Six Degrees of Adolph Hitler, which is me playing on the better known Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, itself fooling with the theory that everyone, on average, is connected to each other through no more than five other people. At issue here (with my concept, not the theory) is I’ve never been able to decide how to go at it. A pseudo-theory? A game? A rant? A fudge brownie recipe? And I’ve got to face facts: Hitler is a hard comedy nut to crack in these one-offs.

An idea I’ve always liked but never went far on is to create a series of posts with the blanket title The Kafkaesquí Desk Reference. Each would be written in that common monotone, false intellectual style of any general reference tome, but on subjects their editors lack the guts to tackle (or have the smarts to skip, I’m not sure which). One focuses on ways for the jaded to recapture innocence. Another is meant to provide information on life-threateningly fast weight loss techniques. A third just says Cheese Holidays. Maybe I won’t dump this one after all.

Then there’s the simple one liners which fail to get past that single sentence. Gumption lost it’s meaning, hence it’s gumption, at some point. Blogged Down is far too cute a title to contain anything I’d want to spend time with. Shatner’s Women, which I’m fairly certain refers to the green ones he had as Start Trek’s Captain Kirk, is both overly Trekkie and done to death — whether or not I’ve got a new slant on it. And if someone can deduce what I had up my sleeve with Shabadoo’s and Don’ts, I’m willing to hear you out. I’ll even give co-author credit. A small one.

There’s a lot more prep and production for this blog than what finishes up on the page. Yet look at that! I still found a way to get the debris in a Blurried Musings article. Garbage can make good fuel, if a bit pungent.