Doodle Grive
Hello! And welcome to my Doodle Grive.
Today we’ll be discussing the act of naming. Specifically, we will discuss the pressure a person will sometimes put themselves under when naming a project which they intend to work on for some time. This discussion of nominal anxiety will come in the form of a case study, as I have just recently entitled a blog which I intend to work on for some time... and I gave it a stupid name.
Cue: what’s a Doodle Grive?
A Doodle Grive is, I usually do my writing in my Google Drive, but I’m not going to make my Google Drive public to you animals, so this is my Doodle Grive. It’s where I will write things for people to see. As opposed to my Google Drive, which is filled mostly with things for people not to see; ie. navel-gazing self-reflective scraps of nothing of interest to anyone but myself or a trained psychiatrist, and half-finished political and philosophical essays with little consistent theme whatsoever.
I wanted a Doodle Grive because I need my writing to be more morphus than the privacy of my Google Drive requires. I want my writing to feel like it was done on purpose; toward some deliberate, though sometimes not entirely explained, end. This indeterminate end makes the ambiguity of the name, “Doodle Grive,” its primary meritorious attribute.
If I named my blog something like, “Write or Die,” then I would have had to write about serious things, with serious consequences, using serious words all the time. I wouldn’t even call them posts. They’d be articles. That’s how serious it would be. That degree of seriousness doesn’t sound like a ton of fun, so I imagine I would quit.
Doodle Grive, on the other hand, is perfect because it doesn’t mean anything.
A hollow heading is the most ideal sort, because a name which means nothing also means everything. It takes on the character of its existence. The nonsensical quality of “Doodle Grive,” when considered in context of a healthy inconsistency of thought over time, is its chief qualification for its task. Absurdity affords me the opportunity to do as I please, which is almost always what I prefer to do anyway.
Is it possible that some theme emerges in my writing and suddenly the blog becomes about something? Sure. I might even do some discrete series within the Doodle Grive. Maybe I’ll make different folders to keep different types of writing. I could put poetry in here. Or jokes. I even have some writing in my Google Drive I could use if I ever wanted to post something, but didn’t have anything fresh written. You probably wouldn’t even know.
The only structure I want to lock myself in right now is that Doodle Grive will be written by me. Me will be the consistent factor. I will write things that I want to write. And I will write them for myself. This way, whether anyone reads or not, I’ll keep writing.
It’s not that I don’t care what people think of my writing. Quite the contrary. Since all this writing will be representative of myself, every judgement cast on it will reflect on me directly. I just don’t want the opinions of the reader to dictate my own. So I will be my audience, and anyone else who reads will read coincidentally.
This post needs to end now, so to synthesize my arguments here, I would just say, let there be blog. We will see if it is good.