Tuesday, April 6, 2021
Why I Write Here
My personal (and unquestionably a flawed) God David Bowie once said in an interview, “If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area.” I take that to heart whenever I do writing and basically anything meaningful in life. The other issue I have is I rarely take things that seriously. Still, it’s good to use Bowie’s thought as the foundation to make many mistakes as well as occasional successes.
At a New Year’s Party in 2013, I felt depressed and slightly drunk, which is not a good cocktail, in my opinion. Yet, an inspiration hit me that I must write every day in 2014 and post it on my Facebook page as well as on my personal blog. I first called this “365,” but the moronic Whole Foods took that name a year later for their discount stores, which I believe is going out of business. Or more likely changed into Whole Foods. I keep forgetting that Amazon never fails or looks back on failure. Like that evil empire, I must keep at it and at all cost. On January 1, 2014, I wrote my first public journal entry, and I think it was about making toast in someone else’s home. Not exactly a dynamic entrance, but nevertheless a start, and I was nervous as hell. This comes back to the David Bowie quote above. Clearly, I was in an area of significant discomfort. Yet, I felt alive every morning when I woke up and started writing my daily blog/post.
“The World of Tosh Berman” is a continuation of expanding that journal procedure to make it last forever. To be honest, when I stopped writing the journal on December 31, 2014, it was the most miserable experience. I was exhausted, yes, but I was thrilled that I kept at it, and on top of it, I love the writing. Can one love their own writing? If I was an honest person, I would say, “In all honesty, yes.” The tricky thing is that I’m not always honest - either to myself or perhaps to my dear readers. There will always be that odd juxtaposition of truth and false. Still, eventually, since I live in the grey parts of my world, it will come together in a very organic manner.
The goal is to keep on writing a regular, if not daily journal, and enter it here on Substack.com. I spend a great deal of time thinking about myself, and that sounds horrific. Still, all of my favorite writers seem to dwell on the subject matter of identity or why they feel in a certain way. The tricky thing is not to be too narcissistic but to hide it in a very entertaining and hopefully exciting writing approach. I’m surrounded by people I love and objects that I adore. Often, it’s the objects that win out in the end when it’s fighting against humankind.
If you care to subscribe and pay for it, that will be fantastic, of course. What I promise is to do the best I can, and to be honest (oh-oh) is that I think of you all as my audience, and I never, in that show-biz manner, ever want to fail my public (if that exists).