Today it took me an hour and a half to get home from work. An hour and a half. For a 25-mile drive. That’s insane. The traffic was bumper-to-bumper at 25-30 mph for most of I-75, and then, when I thought I had almost made it home, a huge garbage truck ran off the road into the ditch, and they needed three tow trucks (parked sideways across the two-lane country road) to pull it out. What a mess. I’m glad I ate an apple before I left work.

I just ate the last bite of my Toblerone bar. Good thing I wrote about it yesterday, because after today, I probably would never have thought of mentioning it again. Which segues nicely into a fundamental operational question of blogging, “What do I write about?” Many people would find writing 500 words a day extremely difficult, but once one learns to write, the question instead becomes, “What do I not write about?” At first, you hope for something interesting to happen to you so you’ll have something to write about. After words start coming, though, you realize you can babble on about pretty much anything for 500 words. Twice now I’ve springboarded off a common item sitting on my desk to fill up a blog. (I wonder if it’s coincidence that both of the items were chocolate?) Someday, I’ll probably wind up writing a blog based on the sticker on the front of my computer. (More foreshadowing!)

But the act of writing about something within a word-limit requires that you not write about virtually everything else. What events are worth remembering? What things are worth reflecting on and writing about? I have mentioned two events that happened today: the drive home from work and the chocolate bar I ate. All other events from this day will be lost forever, never committed to the bits and bytes of the computer, and fading quickly from my neural synapses. I must make a value judgment when I write, and I must make that judgment within a few hours from the time the event happens; that is, without the perspective that time gives. I am basically guessing what will turn out to be important or worth remembering. Already, I can think of a dozen minor things that happened today, which, in and of themselves, are not worth writing about, but, combined with events that might happen in the future, could lead up to something quite newsworthy. Who was it that said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards?” Which makes it difficult to utilize common literary techniques like foreshadowing. Like it or not, my life cannot be blogged like a novel, complete with dramatic unity and artistic coherence. At one point in my life, this would have bothered me, but I’ve come to appreciate the intrinsic artistic merit chaos and limited perspective have to offer.

Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage,” but from here onstage, it’s hard to see it.