My four-year old son loves to pretend like he’s a dinosaur. He walks around grunting with hand hands bawled up into claws, snorting and stomping. I act like it gets on my nerves and I tell him to stop a lot but the truth is that I love it. I love it becuause it’s so alive. He’s full of such creative spirit. His mind races and roars just like his father’s did at that age and still does at times.

The other day, he was a sauropod or some other ancient beast and he was stomping backward. I was finishing up my dinner at the table and my wife was changing the baby upstairs. As I watched him walk backwards towards me then stomp forwards out of the room, I was reminded of the lyrics from from the Counting Crows song Time and Time Again:

I wanted to see you walking backwards
to get the sensation of you comin’ home.
I wanted to see you walking away from me
without the sensation you’re leaving me alone.

I wanted to freeze that moment in time because I know that too soon, I’m going to be the enemy. I’m going to be shut off from his mind and heart during those teenage years. It’s going to be like a fledgling vampire and his maker from one of the Anne Rice books–so intimately connected yet so emotionally distant.

I don’t blog to make money although it would be nice someday. I don’t blog because I want to get an agent and publish a NYT Best Seller although it would be nice. And I don’t blog to make friends or get laid because my wife and children give me too much love for any one man to handle.

I blog because I want to leave a legacy, something all mine. Sure, they’re just words but each post is a moment frozen in time, a small piece of my psyche and my heart for the world to see. I blog because I’m a writer and it’s what I was born to do. I blog for you second but I blog for me first.

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