I experimented with increasing readership through catchphrases and links to popular subjects.

Now that I have dropped both of those references, the readership for this particular blog has dropped significantly.

Freedom!

Now I know I have this space to myself again, with perhaps one or two occasional readers stopping by, but no target audience to compliment or percentages to massage for advertisers.

My personal quest can continue.

Independence is mine.

But independence and originality are not the same, are they?

I look around the study/junkroom and search for items that indicate originality or creativity on my part.

• A small stack of journals, short stories and poems
• A watercolour painting
• Some photographs stitched together

Hundreds of items in this room not included in that list were created by someone else(s).

Does a pile of books arranged in a particular order constitute originality or creativity?

Or computer equipment sorted by technology?

This time period between my 49th and 50th birthday, in the year 2011, I celebrate personal freedom and independence.

I no longer have to entertain others.

I can close my eyes to the wants and needs of people around me and give in to my wants and needs.

How will that affect my wife’s “battle” with her sister in-law for my wife’s mother’s attention?

How do I release the final thoughts associated with religious/political/social fantasies of those I don’t need to deal with, even in passing, knowing I am not financially better off now than I was four years ago?

As a lampoonist, how do I create an original work by lampooning my own original work?

Experimentation, of course, as always.

For starters, relieving myself of the burden of reading general news sites in order to remain topical.

No worries about finding a niche in which I’m a professional expert.

Back to writing in my journal knowing I have no one but myself looking at these words.

The sadness of childlessness and having no friends (other than my wife and our two cats) is also the freedom and joy of individuality.

Yes, I am a social being but I find social conversation boring, for the most part, because talking with another person about the least common denominator is burdensome.

That said, what does this social being do next?

As a writer and amateur thinker, what shall I think of and write a satirical response about?

Hmm…time to wander in my wondering once again, a new storyline to fabricate.