The Why of This Blog

Albert Einstein defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." By that definition, I'm insane. By constant disappointment and the expenditure of much money, I'm learning to recognize my insanity when it strikes and reason myself out of it, so that I resist the temptation, let's say, to bid on yet another old diary on eBay in the hope that somehow, this time, I'll happen upon just the right way to turn the pages or scratch the ink so that the living, breathing past rises up off the page and becomes the present — but with me present in it, and then —

And then what? I have no idea. I don't know what I want from the past. I love the internet, I love penicillin, I love air conditioning, I love the right to vote. Perhaps it's peace and quiet: how wonderful it would be to step outside my house of an evening and hear the frogs singing instead of the continual, drawn-out whoosh of cars passing my house every three minutes, of more cars driving by on State Road 51, and the distant, ceaseless roar of traffic on Route 30. Perhaps it's the ability to see the stars as I once saw them in the night sky over a farm in Missouri in 1970 — the Milky Way like a dusty path across the heavens.

But if it's peace and quiet and stars I want, a more reasonable way to go about getting those things would be to move to some remote area in Wyoming.

Perhaps it's a vague belief that in another time I would be another person — a reasonable enough wish, in my case — but a more reasonable way to cope with that problem is that wonderful modern invention, Prozac.

So it's been with some undefined but impelling desire that I've gone about doing the same thing over and over — bidding on eBay for some diary or letter or photograph; sending away good money through PayPal; waiting impatiently until that happy day when my purchase comes in the mail and I unwrap it ... and it sits inert and useless in my hand.

I fall off the wagon very rarely these days, with respect to buying things on eBay and expecting anything to come of it.

And yet here I am, doggedly if desultorily (and expensively) researching Ainsworth, Indiana, a town that politically doesn't exist, that physically is hardly noticeable, that probably even in its heyday was not an interesting place to live.

And somehow, deep in my heart of hearts, I really do suspect that when I finally establish that the railroad station was where I think it was ... something will happen. I don't know what, but something.

So, yes, the why of this blog is insanity.