Weblog Reboot

 Over the past year, I have kept a hand-written journal of my thoughts as they are triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. I had the quaint idea that they may be of interest to somebody someday. But, it is a hand-written hardcopy paper-based journal and as such, it will be exposed to the vagaries of chance of whether my posterity will judge it worthy of preserving (along with many years of other Gregg-written memos and thoughts). Today, I decide that perhaps I should put some of these things and others into the cloud in the form of weblog entries. Even then, I realize that weblogs are passé. While it's on a corporate platform, I still think the format is more under my personal control than other social media platforms. Perhaps some people will actually read this and perhaps they may wish to participate in meaningful discussions. We shall see.

I've had many teachers in my formative years of which I thought highly. One of them was Miss Plato in my junior year high school English class. She threw much of the standard curriculum (American Literature) out the window and decided to teach us how to write. Her regimen included turning in a paragraph of written work every day. The purpose was to get us to exercise our brains daily in the discipline of writing. She wasn't at all interested in the content (which took a lot of pressure off our young minds) but she was brutal about basic things like spelling, punctuation, and grammar. If your paragraph had any of the verboten errors in these errors, you receive a score of 0 for that day's paper. Assuming your were able to get past that threshold, the paper was graded on how well you expressed you thought clearly and meaningfully. The accumulated grades on the daily paragraphs scored as half your grade for the entire class. American literature was merely the mountain that was mined for ideas to use in our paragraphs. I've always appreciated her take-no-prisoners attitude toward things that mattered. The sad part of the story is that her ideas didn't sit well with suburban Texas parents in 1967 and she only lasted a single year. (There is a hint of a memory that she may have had a same-sex partner and that may have contributed to her short tenure.) Regardless, I will always remember her fondly and I regret that so few students were able to benefit from her influence.

This is a long story to basically say, having been journaling by hand, I intend to use this space to do some journaling in the cloud on a frequent, disciplined basis. Perhaps, some of my hand-written material will find it's way here.