On Blogging: A Memoir on the Craft

Well, been a while since we've last left our hero, eh World? Much has happened, one would think, in the meanwhile, but perhaps not so much. Graduation come and gone. Finished the whole Ivory Tower thing (www.ivorytower.umn.edu). I have since been accepted into grad school and a graduate certification program (one at MSU, one at DU) and am doing both. Hell, I'm leaving for the latter of them tomorrow, which is actually the impetus of my writing in this thing again.

One of the things that worry -- I only use the word 'worry' here because I can't think of a more accurate one -- me about blogging is that there is potentially no one out there reading what I've written. It's kind of like secretly writing in your journal, and then leaving it out on the kitchen table for the world to see, and deep-down hoping that someone is going to stumble across it on some rambling trip through the Internet/Kitchen, pick it up, and exclaim to him or herself: "Aha! This is the sort of wisdom that I can get behind. I need to read this and rejoice!" The fantasy ends, some time in the future, with the blog writer being given a large sum of money for his or her clever witticisms.

I mention this because -- and this is largely my own fault, one must pay advertisers in this day and age even for one's own personal blog -- I'm not sure that I have a reader base larger than one, perhaps two. To be honest, I'm counting myself in that reader base, as I will periodically check up on this thing, click "Refresh, Refresh" (anyone?) and see if anyone has left that long-awaited message: "Derek. You've changed my life with what you have written here and left in public domain. Congratulations on being the Single Undisputed Master of the Written Word [caps mine]." In reality, it would probably be written in Internet-Speak, so it would read something more like : "dreek kewl blog. check out this lin kfor great sex leg panty!" Or something like that.

The reason that I have so few readers, and that I suspect most blogs have so few readers, is that no one is nearly as interested in my own life as I am. Though I don't read many blogs myself (perhaps an indicator of where I fail; one should always imitate if one can't initiate), I'm always drawn to the ones that just recycle old news. For example, blogs that keep me reading are the ones that reference things from the New York Times website for example, and then make marginal comments on them. It's kind of like getting your news from the newspaper and finding that someone has already filled in the crossword, but instead of being angry, you're pleasantly amused to find all sorts of esoteric minutia about the day's news. The key to this sort of blog is that you have to update it pretty much daily, as if you don't, your O-So-Faithful-Reader will find another equally witty place to get the same news (obvious exceptions to this are people like David Sedaris or Ariana Huffington, whose either wit or complete lack thereof are the reasons to read the blog in the first place).

This last is my own sort of failing, or at least similar to it. I don't remember that I have a blog often enough for me to update it with any sort of consistency. I'd like to think that's because I have so many Important Real World Things that demand my attention, but it's really because I'm too flighty. Blogging is a kind of escapism for me, and the thing about escapism, with the exception of the Big Three (Sex, Drug, Drinking), making a habit of any of them decreases the allure of said escapism. If I go running every time that I'm upset, pretty soon I'm just going to have some really great calves, but the endorphins won't kick in as quickly or as strongly. It's just the same way with blogging. To make matters worse, I blog only when I can't think of anything decent to write that I would want to work up to a level of publication. Think about that for a minute. My solution to writer's block is to write things and then leave them on the kitchen table of the planet. The big difference, I suppose, is that I don't even perform a rudimentary spell-check on this, which is kind of liberating for me, having just performed a literary jousting match with an editor for some essay I wrote.

The writer in me wants to cook up some really important summation, a la J.D. in Scrubs. "What have we learned today?" sort of thing. The blogger in me, however, really wanted to just stop writing half-way through that last paragraph and then leave you, the Faithful Reader, to decide whether I got sick of writing, did it intentionally, or if my internet just kind of crapped out. Perhaps I suffered a fatal heart attack like the animator in Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail, and with my last failing breath hit "Publish Post." How would you know (especially if this last were the case, and I was, in fact, dead as a damn door-nail) until I came back the next week. I think that's what I forget. My readers here may not even know me in real life. I'd like to think that they do, but really, I'm not describing my own life. All I'm doing here is giving you a sort of snapshot of what I see the interesting thoughts of my life are. The funny thing is, you now know something about me because my choosing of the portions of my life that I think you'd like to read about.

Actually, that wasn't a half-bad ending. Let's just leave it there.