You never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Author Unknown

A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed.

Henrik Ibsen

Anything that endures over time sacrifices its ability to make an impression.

Robert Musil

The great thing about the Internet is that it can make you seem more well-read than you actually are. I was pondering first impressions and how they may change the course of our lives. Now I don’t necessarily believe that I present a fantastic first impression. I’m sure many is the time that someone has passed me over for this or that based on appearances. I don’t particularly believe in or adhere to style or social niceties, and small talk leaves me speechless. This befuddles some people who strongly believe in these things; but as not a means to an end I dispense with them.

I’m okay with this.

And then comes this blog. On any given day it may make either a good first impression or one more sour than lemon juice and Bourbon. Is it these thousand words that Ibsen writes about or is it more Musil’s thought that the longer it endures, the less distillable it becomes? Despite my flippant floppancy I am a man of both action and my words. My blog has existed for over seven years. Is this fact remarkable in some way? How shall we define remarkable? A testament to self-absorption or my commitment to a strange concept: the public private journal?

I can only aspire make the best of what this blog is. And that is I. Do I now somehow feel obliged oblogged the oblogation to post seemingly meaningful yet surprisingly shallow observations? Why must every other sentence in this entry end in a question mark?

Whoever you are, – and you know who you are even if I don’t – thank you for sticking with me. You prove that first impressions account for nothing but demonstrating the initial impressee’s unimpressiveness.

I would end this entry with two quotes from a writer who professed to be neither stylistic nor deep, yet whom history proved to be both.

Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.

It is only the superficial qualities that last.  Man’s deeper nature is soon found out.

Oscar Wilde