The world according to Hammy

Nukie had posted a comment on Onion Dribbles that has me thinking. I guess blogs mean different things to different people. Maybe I'm being reactionary but I feel compelled to explain myself somewhat.

I went out to breakfast Friday with an old high school friend. She told me how much she likes reading "the blog", although she doesn't leave comments. It's funny because there aren't too many people in the "real world" who know about it. So I guess that it leaves me a little room to wander.

I told her that the nice thing about having a blog (with relative anonymity, if I don't count my brothers) is that it lets you become a caricature of yourself (an exaggeration if you will).
Part of what makes me, me is that I care about the world around me. I don't like injustice, corporate greed or a government run by billionaires who pretend to give a crap about anyone who isn't. I don't like the use of other peoples kids for cannon fodder, or using tax dollars for personal political agendas. I don't like not being able to buy a decent made item stamped "Made in USA" and I don't like the outsourcing of white collar jobs to India. I don't like conveniently porous borders to slave stock the so-called "unskilled labor" jobs with illegal aliens and I really don't like the shafting of the middle class American by business and government alike.
I don't like capitalism "gone wild" that makes money without any conscience or accountability, I don't like successive generations inheriting "crumbs from the table" if anything useable on this planet at all, and I don't like the state of health care in this country and the growing number of uninsured (or underinsured) people.

The problem is I'm not rich, I'm not powerful and I'm not in politics. But I still care.

So I have a place to talk about all of that.

As far as personal stories, writing has always been a way for me to take the things I'm thinking about out of my head (or heart) and put them on something relatively innocuous, like paper or in this case e-paper, so that I can view them from a different perspective. Turn them all around and look at them from all angles I guess. There is an art technique called chiaroscuro. It is the arrangement of light and dark. The light parts are viewed as important and necessary as the dark parts in forming a picture. I don't write things to make people feel bad, or make someone look bad (unless it's that asshole Bush and crew). I write about things to learn about myself. How am I connected to these people? How do I feel about things that happen or have happened and what it means to me now, if anything at all. And sometimes stark realities just make a good story. That's not to say the story will always be a happy one per say. But sometimes it's not an unhappy one either. It's just irony. Irony is one of my favorite happenings in life. Even when it doesn't turn out well. There's just something about irony that I find appealing. I don't know what to say. I do write some funny stuff. Actually, I write a lot of funny stuff, I think...

It's like when I used to work in the OR and they'd hand off some body part or another and you'd stare at it, sitting in the bowl. You'd stare at it with this kind of strange mix of revulsion and fascination and think things like "Boy, we sure do look a lot like chicken sometimes." or "I'm never going to eat steak again." or "Holy shit, is that what that looks like." or "How the hell am I supposed to fit this in that container?" or a whole lotta other weird thoughts.

Sometimes ya just need to say things. If nothing else, just to see if there's anyone out there
who feels the same way.

-Ham for a Day