“What’s the difference between a blog and a regular old column?” my wife, Julee, asked somewhat skeptically the other day when I told her I would be blogging for our website. I was tempted to joke that blogs don’t require good spelling or grammar but I didn’t want her to get the wrong idea.
“Blog is short for web log and it has a more spontaneous feel to it, a kind of raw compositional quality,” I explained.
Really? I asked myself. That explanation sounded pretty lame even to me.
“Oh, you mean like improv,” Julee said.
Now that’s something my wife understands. Julee is a singer and musician who’s worked occasionally in improvisational jazz, most notably with Bobby McFerrin. She was right. Blogs should be a little like improvisational music, composed as they go and loosely thematic. For example, right now I am thinking about Julee’s voice, how, when I first heard it, I couldn’t imagine something that pure and beautiful ever coming out of me. I wanted to get closer to someone who had something wonderful that I could only dream of.
Sometimes you read a story for the same reason: to get close to something beautiful, where a dream becomes a truth, even a spiritual truth. GUIDEPOSTS has always been about people and their stories. In fact, we were doing user-generated content 60 years ago, decades before the Internet was even a glint in Al Gore’s eye.
Stories are everywhere. Every day of every person’s life on this planet is a story. It is a profoundly human thing, our spiritual DNA.
So, welcome to my blog and, if you are a first time visitor to the site, welcome to GUIDEPOSTS, where your stories rule.
Edward Grinnan is Editor-in-Chief and Vice President of GUIDEPOSTS Publications.
