Is this thing on.
So, uh…
I feel kinda late to this party.
How many people even blog on blogs any more?
I mean, I’m going to do my best to get the hang of this.
Better late than never, right.
But I won’t pretend it’s any fun.
I’ve sat on this site for about a year now. Busy as ever, but this site stayed blank. And when I finally came around to setting up the hosting and stripping down the wordpress theme and then, finally finally, writing this up, going so far as to load it into wordpress and everything, I couldn’t even bring myself to hit Publish. I puttered over it a few times and then tried to figure out which -phobia is the one for ‘fear of publishing,’ and eventually gave up and flipped to Netflix.
It’s now a week later, spent writing almost all the way through. I’m holding myself to it. I’m just gonna throw the emo stuff after the fold.
The last time I did something like this for my own personal self was well over a decade ago. And even then it wasn’t a blog per se. It was really more like a folder of html files hosted on my university account. I gave the folder a title: “Thinking About The Pavement.” Because I was finally starting to dig on Pavement, and also because that was a line from this Modest Mouse song (he always does that when he makes love, “so I can avoid premature ejaculation” — I didn’t get it, but I was sold on the sentiment). I can’t even say now why I hosted it on that server — I can’t imagine how anyone would have even found it. That wasn’t the point. But it wasn’t a journal either. It was both public and unseen. I’d been writing every week for the paper in college, which was stressful and time consuming and felt like the most important thing I’d ever done; for that, I had a built-in audience of most everyone I knew. It was instant, personal feedback. This, on the other hand, was stuff I just wanted to chew on and spit out somewhere. I recall that the vast bulk was about either the Sopranos, Fight Club, or Radiohead — and eventually, in one bored week at the end of the summer, all three together in one culminating post that ran about 15,000 words, after which I convinced myself to nip the whole thing right in the bud. Anyway it’s all almost certainly lost to the void now. (I can’t even chalk that up as ‘linkrot’; nothing ever linked to it).
Shortly thereafter, as if my graduation was on some kind of cosmic cue, the world of journalism started showing visible signs of pathetic collapse. Before my post-undergrad eyes, it was being eaten up by a swarm of gawkers, and soon thereafter twitterers, who wrote way faster than I ever wrote, wittier than I could ever be, and they were legion.
In the many years since, I’ve posted a number of things here or there on web magazines and community blogs — even built and published a few such blogs myself — but never tended my own. If and when I thought about it, I felt curiously relieved. Like I’d bargained my way out of an unwinnable game. For a while it felt like posting on Facebook and then Twitter scratched the old urge: I could spit out little satisfying chunks for the amusement of my friends, a few times a day. And over time those chunks came less frequently, just like your typical blog, and they stopped. I didn’t #unplug entirely, but I withdrew again. This time with some ambivalence.
While I had once been thrilled and enthralled by the feeds, I now came to resent them. The beckoning maw. I became a more cautious bargainer in the great psycho-cyber haggle over the content of my life. To be honest, I’ve been struggling with what I think can be called a kind of trauma. The trauma of TMI. Perhaps today this is a common condition. But it snuck up on me, and it was bleak.
Yet here I am. The urge is back. I’ve written a lot over the past year. I’ve even published a lot of it at this other personal site, which is just a Google Site that i set up quick and dirty, leaving it just so, because that was supposed to motivate me to get a proper blog. This I found shamefully easy to procrastinate away. And now, despite bloglessness, I’ve received some notice in some places; so I’ll try to convince myself that these pats on the head are really kicks in the pants. I simply need my own web-place to plot out this next phase of work.
This dubious precedent aside, I’ll try to keep things here mostly business. We’re a ‘.org’ for a reason — and the purpose is praxis. I understand that as more of a social than professional act. So if you’re here, say hello, lest I get lonely.
19. August 2013 by greg.bloom@gmail.com
Categories: Uncategorized |
Tags: emo, meta |
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