Philomeme

I started this thing on a fool's dare, really. Getting married at the courthouse just two days after my mother gave birth to me some 53 years prior seemed a mighty fine time to take another vow. I had seen those online videos where someone takes a picture of themselves every day for a year. Not being much of a photographer, I decided to do the same thing with words; a quote a day as a compensation to my Momma for her labor pains. The first one was "With each breath, i use myself up," and from that first gasp, a daily practice was born.

For a year, I kept up the practice for my Momma, filling the lines with a bit of a Christian way of looking at things. But after the first 365 days, it stopped being a public show and turned into a kind of daily reckoning with myself. It was a way to hold a mirror up to my own foolishness, to keep a running tally of the small bits of wisdom I’d earned and all the mistakes that went into earning them.

The truth of it is, a good deal of this work is about plain old foolishness. I’ve quit this thing twice, a regular-as-rain sort of occurrence, only to get drawn back in, much to my own surprise. There was a year I took off, in 2016, a whole twelve-month stretch where I was paid to stay away from the social media rabble. But I found that a man can't outrun his own habits, even when he's being paid to do it. So I came back, and even wrote two a day for a spell to get caught up.

I've always had a hankerin' for philosophy, and around 2015, I reckon I really dove in deep. I spent a good many hours with my head in books and my ears tuned to podcasts, arguing with every idea I came across. My aphorisms stopped being clever little rhymes and started to feel more like the philosophical essays I was reading that were just plain dry as dust. It made all that wordplay, the puns and such, feel like an afterthought, just a quick flash of wit that wasn't as important as the idea itself.

My little slice of heaven in rural Iowa around aphorism #800, well, it turned out to be a bit less than promised. A few hundred later, I took on the job of city clerk. I figured it was a fine way to serve the community and maybe get to know the people of my new village. And, well, meet 'em I did. It came to pass that the very people I'd come to serve were the reason I found myself resigning a spell later. It's a funny thing, the truths you discover about a place when you're no longer a stranger. That experience sharpened my mind, and it sure did hone my cynicism.

Now, the aphorism making process was a mess, plain and simple. A day's worth of thinking rarely held together for long. Some of them just fell right off the tongue, an epiphany straight from heaven, I'd say. Others were a mighty struggle, written and rewritten, only to be tossed out with the trash. When I put 'em out there, folks would get their feathers all ruffled and want to dispute what I said, but that rough-and-tumble made me better. I had to stand my ground, and in doing so, I came to believe that less than half of my work was even worth the bother.

Well, a fella's got to keep up with the times, and I found out the hard way that social media was the new medium. It started demanding a picture with every aphorism, and it became clear that the medium could be part of the message. From about 2300 and for a good while after, I was a one-man show, findin' old public domain photos and massaging 'em with an editor's eye, trying to make 'em fit the ideas. It was a chore, I tell you, a mighty long spell of work for a quick little thought.

Eventually, the project had to adapt. I didn't want to spend hours on Photoshop. So, around #3100, I enlisted an AI to give me a daily image to go with the words, leaving me more time to focus on the writing itself. I’m usually about a hundred ahead, writing the aphorisms daily but batching the images and poetry when I have some spare time. I also started adding stories and poems to a lot of the later aphorisms. Oddly, the pushback disappeared after that. I'm not sure if the stories drove away the triggered, or just drove people away in general. I suspect the latter.

So here we are, more than a decade in. A little older, a lot wiser, and with a pile of some 3,650 aphorisms. My plan for a while now has been that if only one in ten is worth a hoot, I have enough for a whole year of daily wisdom to share. And I reckon that's the point of it all. I’ve toyed with all sorts of crazy ideas for a lasting legacy, from etching them in metal to burying a lockbox or sending them off to the Library of Congress. But the honest truth of it is, if wisdom is anything at all, it's the example of a life examined. And that, I think, is a notion worth sharing.