Anyway, Friday I took care of the switch (you know, paying for it and stuff) and yesterday I moved all of my files over to the new server. The only thing I was really concerned about was my WordPress installation. Wordpress can be a little finicky sometimes and with the database and all I just wasn’t sure everything would work. It did.

First I copied all my files and directories from the old server to my hard drive, including WordPress, then uploaded them to the new server. Now for the database. I made a backup of the old database (which was saved as an SQL file), created a new, empty database on the new server and ran the SQL. Voila! Worked like magic.

The only glitch was a problem with my archives, post links and categories. When I clicked on an archived post or category I would get a 404 error. Something told me to update my permalinks, which I did, and that fixed it. I’m kind of tickled with myself.

Anyway, we’ll try this new deal out for awhile and see how it goes. Thanks to anyone who happens to stop by now and then and if anyone has any computing questions or problems contact me and I’ll see if I can help. I’m getting pretty good at this.

Blog. That’s a silly word. I don’t like it. I don’t consider myself a “blogger.” I began using a blog platform because it was so much easier than coding and updating my site in HTML and JavaScript. I use WordPress and I like it and it serves my needs well. Actually, one might ask why I even need a site at all, blog-driven or otherwise, and one (meaning me) might answer, “Well, I don’t need one but I like having one and I can have one so I do.”

I like fooling around with computers and learning programming languages and designing databases and hard-coding web pages and stuff like that. Why, I don’t know. I never liked or was good at math (not that that matters, I guess, but it seems as if most computer geeks are math whizzes) and I don’t consider myself the geeky type. My wife says that that tendency (liking computers) is true to my sign. I’m an Aquarius. I don’t know what that means.

This is a blog, then, but I’m not a blogger. I think true bloggers get off on interacting with their community of like-minded bloggers. You know, setting up feeds and link trading and commenting and all that stuff. I don’t interact very well, even with myself.

So, where does that leave me? Why, right here where I am, of course. And I’m going to write something that will take the blogging world by storm; it will be so viral that it will be more contagious than the bird flu; it will spread so fast and furiously that it will melt T1 lines and crash servers. Not only all that but it will be clever and witty and thought-provoking and…

Oh, hell, that was the phone. Got to hit the road again. Guess we’ll have to wait ’til next time.

‘Bye.

Are you one of the 43 million plus Americans who don’t have health care insurance? Then call 123 Healthcare, where getting affordable benefits are as easy as 123. (The emphases are mine.)

When I hear (or read) something such as this it depresses me. Who wrote this and, worse yet, who edited it and approved it and how can they hear it aired day after day and not run screaming into their boss’s office and yell, “Please stop that ad! I made a terrible mistake! Someone who really cares about our language may hear it and do something drastic and I would never be able to forgive myself!”? I am not going to elaborate on what is wrong with this excerpt - either you will notice it (with or without my hints) right away or not. If not, then stop now and go back to your People magazine.

The previous example is just bad grammar, but then there’s this -

Compare Transam to any company out there and they just don’t stack up.

This is an ad promoting a company called Transam. Hard to tell, isn’t it? This excerpt is grammatically correct but demonstrates faulty syntax which is really a sign of faulty logic. No one at Transam seems to care, though.

Here’s another that just irritates the hell out of me. No grammar or syntax problems but, still, it is just wrong.

Do you know the difference between the millions of millionaires in America and you? They decided they wanted to be millionaires and so they went out and did it.

Did they go out and want to be millionaires? Where did they go to do it? Can I want to be a millionaire and just stay home and do it?

Then there’s this exciting statement by Billy Ray Cyrus promoting some new Nashville talent show -

I hold in my hand the next Nashville star!

Big hands, huh? One of the contestants has this to say about her experience -

Just every week you have to bring it.

Huh?

And, finally, a proud husband has this to say about his wife who has been using a new face cream -

I looked at her and I was just wow!

Well, he may have been just wow but I am just disgusted and depressed.

‘Bye.

Back in 1982 when I went on the road for the first time, it was fun and exciting. Everyday was something new - new places and new things. I remember the first time I came over the mountains at night and saw Las Vegas below, lighting up the desert or rolled down I-10 into LA. I still love to drive through the desert at night. I remember drinking with an old Indian in Whitefish Montana and driving down Park Avenue in NYC.

Maine to Miami, San Diego to Seattle and everything in between. I’ve ridden down the old Route 66 from east to west and come down Cabbage Pass with no brakes. It’s a lonely life and a hard one and it’s starting to tell on me. Caffeine and nicotine keep me going now. Used to be reefer and amphetamines. Bad food and long lonely nights. Most of the good old truck stops and diners are gone now, too. Everything now is slick and sterile. No character.

I’m getting tired of the road. Mainly I hate public restrooms, fast food and being away from home. And the traffic is terrible. Everybody going nowhere real fast. I just take it slow and easy and kind of let the rest of the world go by. I don’t get in a hurry. No need to.

The fine moments of surprise and excitement are few and far between now. But sometimes I open my eyes and see white fluffy clouds in a sharp blue sky or snow-capped mountains in mid-summer or an old country lane going nowhere or a storm building out over the Gulf and I think, “It could be worse. I could have a real job.”

It’s honest work. We’re paid by the mile and we earn every dollar we make and it seems lately that we are mostly disrespected and misunderstood. We are probably among the most well informed people in America. Heck, we listen to the radio 24 hours a day, including NPR and Coast to Coast. If you have any doubt that we know a lot of stuff, just ask any one of us. We’ll tell you all about it.

I’m looking for a way out of it (the truck) now. I ride along and dream of having a little office in town and giving guitar lessons and doing computer work - maybe playing a gig now and then. I’m good at English. Maybe I could open an English shop. I could sell footnotes, undangle dangling participles and re-place misplaced modifiers. I live on (what could be) a small farm. I’d like to raise goats and chickens and grow organic vegetables.

But I’m too young to retire and too broke and scared to quit. There are bills to be paid. And the road is still out there, like a siren, singing its bittersweet song. And maybe, just maybe, there’ll be something new around the next bend.

I was thinking that it would be neat to open a place and sell nothing but grits. I would call it, uh, Grits. I would have a grits buffet - grits and all the toppings. Butter (for the stout-hearted) and margarine (for the dainties) and cheese and bacon and country ham and red-eye gravy and salmon patties and grilled shrimp and sardines and buttered toasted biscuits with jelly and cane syrup to go along with it all.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, but down in Louisiana the other day what should I read about but grits buffets. The article was in the lifestyles section of the paper and it seems that grits buffets are all the rage now for parties and entertaining among those in the know in Baton Rouge. See, I’m not out of touch.

Grits. It will take the country, heck, the world by storm. I will become rich and famous - an entrepreneurial guru. People will come to me for wisdom and advice and - grits. And I will not forget my humble beginnings nor the advice of my uncle Bill: make them thick enough to stand a spoon up in.

He said, “Come with me and I will take you places you have never been.”

I said, “I have been a lot of places and I am tired of traveling.”

“Come, then, and I will show you things you have never seen.”

“I have seen so many things until I am almost tired of seeing.”

He said, “Well, what, then?”

I said, “Tell me something I have never heard. Something real and true.”

He said, “We must stop for that. Here, under this tree.”

We sat and then he said, “Son, it has been many years and many miles that has brought us to this particular place and time.”

I said, “Well, that’s true enough. Is that all?”

“Yes”

I was ready to go. I asked, “What’s down the end of this road?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Is that where you’re going?”

“You mean nowhere?”

“No. I mean to the end of the road.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ll go with you that far, anyway.”

I carry notebooks with me all the time. I have a small pocket-size Moleskine, a large Moleskine, a Notabilia and a large ledger. This is probably more notebooks than I should carry about, mainly because I’m always undecided over what to put in what notebook. I sometimes just sit and stare blankly at an empty page or copy stuff from one notebook to another and I generally spend more time just messing with the books than I do writing in them.

Now I’m starting to really be concerned about what I write. Times past, I would just jot down anything that popped into my head. Now I imagine people actually reading my notes (particularly my wife and kids) in the event of my death - an event I am becoming increasingly expectant of. I imagine my audience, then, as a body of curious mourners looking through my pitiful notes after my untimely death. I want them to find something promising and uplifting and that will reveal my inner-self to them in the best possible light. A tough chore. I probably should just stop writing stuff down altogether.

To make matters worse, I now have a blog. Stuff I put there is immediately accessible not only to them (my family) but to the whole online world. “We must consider our audience,” the experts say, but sometimes I feel safer and more comfortable imagining my only audience is me. “Why, then, write at all?” one might ask and I will have to ponder that for awhile and get back later on that.

Later -

I suppose the main reason I write is because I want to be a writer. Someone (Stephen King, I think) said, “A writer writes.” That makes perfect sense and is probably good enough reason, but the truth is that I want to connect with someone. I want someone to read something that I have written and say, “Yeah!” Another reason I write is it helps me “get stuff out.” Stuff such as now, March 18, 2008, as I sit here, the only customer in this Chinese restaurant at mid-afternoon on a cold, rainy day in Canton, OH and listen to the bubbling of an aquarium, the soft oriental music, the banter from the kitchen and feel my loneliness. Now, at my age, I realize there is nothing romantic about loneliness. No song or excellent journal entry or movie or book can ever make it desirable to me again. I have had my fill of it.

Sometimes loneliness can lead to despair- sometimes other things can lead there. Things such as finding out yesterday that my sister’s husband, Billy, had died after a long battle with cancer and the knowing that I have been more or less estranged from her and him and my brother and most of all my family for several years now for reasons too painful for me to write about now or probably forever and the fact that I am far from home and will probably not make it there for the funeral and that I would probably not go if I were home. And sometimes loneliness and despair can lead to depression and keep me there in its dark gloomy embrace until I break free, back to the light. And sometimes writing helps; helps get me back.

I write because I am a writer: because writing affirms that. “A writer writes.” It’s just that simple. And perhaps because my thoughts, sometimes feverishly, most times clumsily, scribbled down on paper, in whatever notebook I choose, may be all that I leave behind.