It isn't easy day after day to come up with something new, interesting, or even apropos to the nature of this weblog. Sure, it covers everything under the sun because metaphysics is everything under, over, and around the sun. Metaphysics literally, not figuratively, examines "existence," or as it used to be called, "Being."
Having everything under the sun to talk about still doesn't make it easy to think of something you have not said before, but it is certain that by tomorrow some subject or other will present itself.
Today I can say that yesterday I joined yet another Ayn Rand website. This time it was Objectivism Online.Net. I'm actually using my real name, not something made up, so I'm there to be found, if you are, too.
I didn't do it for the chat room. I'm not a chatter, as users of Yahoo Answers discovered with my alter-ego there. I am no longer active on YA, though I had reached the top of the Philosophy totem pole. I never chatted with anyone in YA. I quit YA because Yahoo doesn't have enough moderators to objectively determine whether a complaint is valid, so they accept all complaints. Their own rules allow the promotion of your own weblog or other website if it has a bearing on the discussion. Obviously this blog has a bearing on discussions of philosophy. Yahoo still continued to delete my answers when someone complained I was "
No, I joined Objectivism Online.Net because I need to get more feedback to the things I say. My friends have no clue what I'm writing about even when they (attempt to) read this blog. They are not metaphysicians or epistemologists. Even the subjects of ethics go over their heads, because I don't seem to be able to write those kinds of pieces that a freshman in philosophy can comprehend.
I think it is a drawback. I think I could do better. I think I could learn to write down without "dumbing down." But once my fingers begin typing, or my pencil begins making script, (I really do prefer pencil most of the time,) I'm off to the races.
The people who read Objectivist material are one component of my audience. Others are ethicists, etc. A third component are simply people who are interested in a particular subject, and who never return a second time to read the blog because that isn't why they read it in the first place.
And I'll be the first to admit, I have not made it entirely easy for my readers. I didn't always use this large type, and I experimented with ways to make the blog more friendly, which often made it unfriendly. Until I discovered this large type, the blog never looked the same from one day to the next.
I still have problems, when something in the automatic html goes awry. I understand just enough html to get me into trouble, and not enough to get me out of most of the trouble I didn't create. But I'm learning. It's getting better.
In the near future I may be writing this on a Mac laptop. I have no experience whatsoever with Apple. I don't know the difference between it and Linux because I've never used Lunux, either.
I'm going back into retail for a while, trading floor space for my merchandise for labor. I'm moving into a wonderful antiques store that is more like your old Aunt Mabel's attic, the kind of stuffed attic you can barely walk through. But nothing is hidden, everything is dusted, and everything is expensive--everything but my products, so what the customers don't spend on antiques they may spend on my merchandise. Service work doesn't suit me as a profession; service is what I give away.
So I do service work for AA in my district. Ayn Rand was right about the Serenity Prayer: "It names the mental attitude which a rational man must seek to achieve." [Philosophy: Who Needs It; Chapter 3]
So I guess even when I can't think of anything to begin a philosophy blog with, I can still end up with philosophy, by means of the "six degrees of separation" method. It may not always be six; but I seamlessly moved from "what to blog about," to joining Objectivism Online.Net; to needing more feedback; to who the readers are who could give me feedback; to improving the look and feel of my website; to html and using a Mac in my new store location; to hating work in the service professions but liking to give it away when I can be of service to people I need for my own recovery; to the mental attitude I need if I am to practice the principles of Objectivism in all my affairs.
Writing philosophy can be fun. I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.
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