Jeez... Not another damn blog!

Yep... that's what the world needs more of.  Another pompous ass spouting his unsolicited opinions and commentary on whatever subject enters his brain.  So, as a curmudgeon-in-training, I have decided to fill that void and start my own narcissistic exercise in general whining.  I figured this way I can get some of my anger and thoughts off my chest and not ignite another flame war on that scourge of mankind, Facebook.

On the subject of Facebook, it really has become the bane of 21st Century existence.  I thought it was so cool when I first joined.  I was able to connect with friends and acquaintances I hadn't talked to in 30 years, and relatives I never really knew.  Yeah, sometimes you would find out more than you wanted to know about a person, but hey.... it was all good.  And then the memes and fake news postings began.  And people began discovering the joys of letting it all hang out through impersonal "sharing".  After all, no matter what your personal prejudice, on Facebook you can find a thousand people who share it, and since you're not speaking to anyone in person, civility can go out the window.  I really believe Donald Trump could never have been elected without Facebook.

I do like to exchange opinions with friends and family however, and I'm thinking that maybe this blog will provide a better vehicle.  It definitely provides better compositional capabilities, and I'm hoping that if anyone is interested enough to read my postings and wishes to comment, we can keep the discussion civil and to the point, without all the extraneous comments from outside morons that always seems to happen with Facebook posts.

And if this whole exercise isn't self-aggrandizing enough, I have a genealogical motive as well.  I usually watch Antiques Roadshow and quite often someone will show up with letters from their great-great-grandfather or other distant relative.  My family tree is not so fortunate.  Most of my great-great-grandparents were illiterate and those who could have written, apparently never did so, or at least nothing has survived any of them.  I would give a kidney to have letters from my distant ancestors.  They reveal so much about the personality and life of the person, something not revealed by the dry facts of their lives.

All that made me think that although I maintain a fairly extensive family tree of my ancestry, there is little there that would inform my descendants regarding what type of a person I was.  What my thoughts, opinions, and concerns were here in the second decade of the 21st Century.  Maintaining a blog will hopefully induce me to begin that task and demonstrate that indeed, every family tree deserves a few black sheep.

Let's see how this goes.