Welcome to my blog

"At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there's a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they're returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth -- in other words, to silence."
     - Albert Camus, The Plague

The act of blogging - what compels people to share their thoughts and feelings with an audience that may not even exist?

Perhaps it's an outlet.  An active mind fills with thousands of ideas every day.  For many of those thoughts, a person will have nothing material to show for them.  So we write our thoughts to create a place where our thoughts can exist for more than a moment and to give ourselves the chance to organize and better develop them.

Perhaps it's for dialogue.  Every day we go through our routines, compelled to communicate with those we've chosen to have in our lives and those who happen into our world by chance.  Yet so much of that communication is irrelevant to the thoughts that compel our minds. So we write our thoughts to allow others to enter into a discussion, challenge us, and help us refine our thoughts, all while we influence those who encounter our ideas.

I'm sure there are other reasons people write blogs, but those are my motivations.  It's been nearly two years since I stopped regularly writing a personal blog.  I've missed the outlet and the dialogue that came with writing it, so I'm committing to starting again.  I'm fully retiring the blog I wrote during the first year of law school.  It's time to put a period on those thoughts and start something new - even if in name only.

I plan to write at least three times a week on varied topics.  Anything that interests me is fair game, but the focus will probably be political, legal, and sociological with a fair dose of entertainment and food - basically a summary of my life.

Finally, a few words about the title. It's difficult to write something substantive and well-thought-out in the length of a blog post.  Writing succinctly is not an excuse to write without logic, reason, or deduction.  It's an invitation to perfect and strip your ideas of the superfluous.  Each sentence must be more than mere rhetoric.  As Camus said, rhetoric is a function of habit.  And truth is a function of the silence that accompanies brevity.