Blog Aborning!

   Why have I started to blog?  I am freeing myself from facebook—sort of. Facebook is primarily happyland.  It’s good for social contact, for staying in touch with family and friends, keeping tabs on your kith and kin.  But if you want to develop a thought or refine an observation, it’s a little like dancing in the dark by yourself. So, I'm looking for a bit more verbal room.  Where posts can perambulate, perhaps even percolate.

   What's with the moniker, "Casey's Whollywrit"?  Well first, it’s an obvious pun on “Holy Writ,” a reference to scripture.  And as one daughter pointed out, “Your posts on FB can only be so long, but with this . . . you can go to the blog and find the w-h-o-l-e  d-e-a-l.”  She and her sister collapsed in laughter at that witticism. I didn’t have to ask, a la Archie Bunker, “Was that a shot?”  I know when I’ve been punked. It’s all right.  I'm certain they love me. They have to; the will can always be changed.
   I mean “wholly” to convey not only completeness but conscious attention to the right words in the right order.  Two writers feed into that purpose.  Yeats gave us the norm that “words alone are certain good,” in this passage from an early  poem:

                                    But O, sick children of the world,
                                    Of all the many changing things
                                    In dreary dancing past us whirled,
                                    To the cracked tune that Chronos sings,
                                    Words alone are certain good.

   And Mark Twain’s trenchant comment that "the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug" set a standard hard to reach.  To make the attempt is to valorize careful diction, choosing one word over another.  I can't imagine writing or speaking anything without making conscious choices.

Finally, I intend to satisfy myself first in what I write here.  While comments are welcome and appreciated, my content will not be comment driven or shaped to evoke the equivalent of that little red flag that shows someone has clicked "Like" or left a note.  I've still got facebook for that.  Don't we all.