Mark's First Blog Post In A Very Long Time

Hi there, it's Mark.  Mark LaRocco.

So, for years now (or at least many months) I've been telling Holly how I miss writing.  Sure, I write a lot for work.  But that's just boring legal stuff.  Memoranda, motions, replies, letters and emails, and things like that. I feel like my creative writing groove is gone, but not unrecoverable.  With more practice writing non-legal stuff, I can get good again.  Or at least acceptable.

I believe I had the idea to just piggyback onto Holly's blog, as a contributor, and Holly had the idea to rename the blog from Holly Lynn Says to LaRoccos' Modern Life.  Brilliant.  So here I am.

Holly is good at keeping everyone updated on our growing little family, what with our two little boys and all. I imagine I will spend some of the time writing about my family.  But I hope to write about other things that interest me such as movies, sports, people, and peanut butter.

The point is, I need a bit of a creative outlet to get my ideas on paper, and then elaborate and expand on them and develop them and see if they mean anything or if they are just fluff.  I found that when I used to write papers for school, sometimes my good ideas actually grew out of my writing, rather than the other way around.  I think my best papers came out of my philosophy classes and some papers I wrote about faith for an Institute class from a Brother Harding. I've gone back and reread some of them, and I can't believe I came up with some of that.  Writing about the paradoxes of faith actually helped me to understand faith better, as if the insights that resulted from the writing would have only sprung forth from the writing itself.

Sometimes, I feel like maybe that is because I'm a slow, deliberative thinker.  Perhaps I overanalyze too much.  This morning I went on a show for KBER 101 with Mick & Allen (The Freak Show) to plug Jolley & Jolley, the fathers' rights law firm I work for.  Mick & Allen, and about three callers, asked questions that I didn't know the exact answers to, but I took some pretty confident shots and stabs at them.  (Why the violent imagery to convey uncertainty?  Shots and stabs?)  As the "expert" on a radio show, I couldn't not know the exact answers.  Confidence was supposed to exude from me.  Using many hedge words, as I did on many a law school exam and the Bar itself, is not what people were looking for.  And I don't think it's what Jolley & Jolley was looking for when they asked me to go on the show.

But my point is, I wish I could have paused for a few minutes after each question, done some legal research, maybe talked to a couple smart lawyers, and given a well-reasoned, well-researched, accurate answer to each question.  But the format of the show doesn't allow for that.

Where was I?  Oh, right, thinking and writing.  I feel like I have good thoughts, and some of them have gone unexplored.  I would like to explore my thoughts.  This, I feel, happens best in two ways: (1) Good conversation, and (2) Writing.  And sometimes, my writing, as annoying as that may be to read, will sound like a conversation between two people.  No, it won't. Yes, it will.

At any rate, I hope to use this blog as a way to express ideas, vent, give opinions, and occasionally be funny. Also, it will act as a sort of journal.  I've been writing in my journal less and less, and I've decided that it is due at least in part to my handwriting getting worse and worse.  A blog should solve that problem.

Well, I was hoping to wrap this up with a neat and tidy point.  But, I guess not.  Like the great work Freakonomics, there may be no grand unifying theme.

Well, see ya later.