What's That Book About?

For Christmas, my wife did me the sweet and embarrassing honor of giving me my collected works in a bound volume. Not my entire ouvre, but a year's worth of the blogs not unlike the one you are reading right now. The major difference being that the gift my wife gave me had a cover and pages and weight. This thing that I sit in front of once a day and type until my point is made or the end of my patience is reached doesn't have any of that. There is a beginning, which is what you are currently reading.
There is a middle, which is about to start, and you'll have to forgive me for being all post-modern on you all, but this idea of having a book made of the things I write is generally confounding to me. I have made books in the past. In fourth grade, I generated a series of children's books. Written by children (me), for children (the kids in my class), it never occurred to me that there was some other way to express oneself. The painful insecurities I felt as a round kid with glasses were not felt as writer and illustrator. The world of my imagination was one I could control. The misfit characters I chose to star in my stories always ended up proving themselves in the end, and they lived happily ever after.
By the time I was in junior high, this wasn't the case. The young men and women who appeared in the fiction I wrote led bleak lives of quiet desperation. These were stories of suffering that I chose not to share with anyone. Many of them were written on the manual typewriter on which I was also writing my homework. These stories piled up in a desk drawer and were eventually lost to the ages. Somewhere in there, I did manage a great burst of self-revelation/navel-gazing in ninth grade which I shamelessly referred to as "The Great American Novel." I passed that one around to a select group of friends in hopes of gaining connection or sympathy or attention that I didn't feel I was getting by being the round kid with glasses in ninth grade.
In spite of the grandiose title, even that attempt at volume was nothing longer than Stephen King's grocery list. I was committed to the short story, and a new electric typewriter helped me churn those out with greater alacrity. That and the steady stream of depressing poetry that seemed to pour out of me was carefully filed away after my English teachers had a chance to reflect on them. It would be several more years before the select few of these would be archived on a floppy disk, transcribed by yours truly in a flurry of self-preservation that eventually became my first attempt at publication in anything outside of my circle of friends.
I have always found a receptive audience in my family, and friends, but the idea of burdening someone with a book of words that were jammed together with some larger collective meaning or heft stopped being on my list of intents about the time I graduated from college. The dreams of being a published author harken back to the day I got a literary magazine to publish a few of my dark rhymes. It should be noted that the next time I was published was when my wife entered an essay I wrote in a competition about Home.
Then came this blog, where I stack up a page a day, and it was that same lady who first took it upon herself to gather together from all the disparate thoughts and musings my stories about being a teacher. Ten years ago, that made quite the pamphlet. And now, as we close in on the end of this entry, I have a phone book of all my blogthought for a year. It's not like the Manhattan White Pages, more like the one I remember from my hometown. It's a lot of words. All in one place. And while I can't lay particular claim on any of them as mine, I can take pride in the fact that I chose the order in which they were arranged. A book. Mine.