Blogging is all about the present tense. It can’t help it. It’s the nature of the format. Each post is contained within a given date. It is marked for obsolescence the moment it is posted. The structure of blogging demands now, today, the instant and immediate. It’s like a newspaper in that today is what counts and yesterday is something that only those on a mission to find a given something come to visit. Yesterdays papers are bird cage liners and fish wrappers while yesterdays blog posts are even less purposeful. You can’t wrap a salmon in a blog post. Last years “365 things that don’t suck about L.A” cannot protect your floor from bird poop and sesame seed shells.
To tell you the absolute truth the one thing about blogging that I don’t like is its obsession with now—and it is sort of strange to be working in a tense that I have some antipathy towards. Present tense is, as a rule, not my favorite one; rather, it’s my least favorite one. Don’t get me wrong, I get that we all live in the present( even when we may live it while looking forward and backwards). It’s not that there is anything inherently wrong with now (from what I hear from Twitter quotes, “the point of power is in the present moment”;” the power is in the now”; “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is God’s gift, that’s why we call it the present.” Ugh, I hate those quotes). It’s just that if hindsight is 20/20 now-sight is Mr. Magoo with a cane and a seeing-eye dog. And the past is so full of narrative and myth and stories well-told. The future is so filled with hope and potential and endless possibility. Now is just a three letter word( so is sex and god so I suppose some good things do come in little word boxes on occasion). Continue reading ‘Intense about tenses’
