A Gentleman's World

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am sorry to pronounce that my former blog is officially dead. I will not try to glorify its death as if it were a great warrior in a tragic war. It was just outdated. One of the main reasons it died was because I just wasn't updating it enough. A blog is like a child. If you don't feed it with enough updated material, it will die on you. I let it die and that was my fault. Another reason is that it lost its meaning along the way. I think that's one of the biggest flaws of an unsuccessful blog. You have to give it meaning. My blogs were very gimmicky. There was big font, a lot of color, esoteric jokes and stories, and a lot of the stuff you see on any other blog. And then it came to a point when I felt like I had an audience that I had to impress and I didn't want to offend. Or I felt like I shouldn't vent and air out my dirty laundry in public. The blog was also very self-centered. There's only so much you could write about yourself without offending your invisible audience (and without being fake.) Basically, it's hard to feel real when you write for the public.

So now I present a totally new blog. I don't know if it will be successful but I will try to make it successful. First, I have to give it meaning. I have to define why I'm writing. There's literally millions of blogs out there and they really only serve as public journals. In this self-centered culture of ours, we've managed to convince a lot of ourselves that our lives are interesting enough to write about and for people to read about. I'll admit that I even fell for a version of that even though I hardly wrote about my outside life. So...the definition of why I write. If I want this to be real, I figure I talk about real life experiences and the lessons I learn from them. All of the best writing are based on the things that people relate to. With my old blog, I guess it was a loud cry for attention to show people that I exist and my piece of the blogosphere is a lot more relevant than most others. I named it "A Gentleman's World." It is not an instructional on how to present yourself. It is the struggle of how difficult it is to be "proper" in this crazy, mixed up world of ours. I say proper as if there was one, definite, appropriate way to act but proper is a frame of mind, the best possible choices we can make amongst complex, innumerable opposition. It is how I handled/wish I would have handled certain situations. It is not really a cry for attention but more like wishful advice to the young ladies and gentleman that care to listen.

I dedicate this blog to myself. I will try to tone down the self-centerism but I feel like I have to make this dedication. The truth is people will let you down. It is probably not on purpose all the time. People will more likely act in self-interest. I've done it before even though I know the stronger truth in my lifetime has been to act in the interests of those I care about. But when people let you down, you cannot count on them to fix it for you. You can only fix your life for yourself. I dedicate this blog to myself because I know I will fix whatever I need to fix. Hopefully, I can help fix up this reality into "A Gentleman's World." I also hope that we can all become inspired by such an undertaking.

Good night and God Bless,

Casanova Ruffin