Answers to The Friday Five

1. Explain why you started to journal/blog.

   Again? All right then...

   I began this just for the hell of it. I've had a writing bug since high-school which goes through different stages of nourishment and starvation on my behalf. Before this, I mostly stuck to keeping a diary and the office newsletter, and that was about it. Then along came Plastic, and all that Web surfing I did while I should have been working paid off in witty, over-stuffed Plastic entries. However, the delusions of a wannabe can't bloom fully when his output is cut short by a collective weblog's editors.

   That's when Salon Blogs popped-up. A perfect outlet for my innane tidbits and to practice link-dropping! And in the end, it's all about the links. My personal take on weblogs is that, with so many of them out there, their main audience is not actually those who read them, but the search engines that spider through them. This weblog is "writing for robots," as I once said. Not that that's any easier.

2. Do people you interact with day to day or family members know about your journal/blog? Why or why not?

   No way! Why should I give them a core dump of my silly, silly mind on the Web when I won't give it to them in the face-to-face. Besides, my weblogging persona is the Hyde to my Jekyll, the alter-ego that allows me to shoot the breeze. I certainly don't need them finding out I'm a Playboy subscriber and a Britney ogler.

3. Do you have a theme for your journal/blog?

   I've gone through different tag lines trying to state the theme: Driving the train of thought, Writing for robots; lately I've been thinking of adding a new one: Deep thoughts made shallow. But the current one has stuck around for a long time and actually describes this enterprise, so read it and wonder:

   A real nowhere man
   sitting in his nowhere land
   making all his nowhere plans
   for nobody

4. What direction would you like to have your journal/blog go in over the next year?

   All I care for is improving the writing. Whenever I look at my referrals and find out what Google is returning from my archives, I feel like crawling into a ball in despair; it seems I've followed to heart the lessons of postmodernism and grown ever more unreadable with each passing day. (I know, I know: "we're [not] the best judge of the quality of what comes out of our heads," and yet...) But if tomorrow is another chance to get it right, then there may be hope yet.

5. Pimp five of your favorite journals/blogs.

   Just five? I'll admit that, as far as weblogs, I mostly stick to those here at Salon Blogs. So check any of them out. Or better yet, check Virtual Occoquan, the weekly digest of this community's output, edited by blog-meister Mark Hoback. Hey, that was easy!

   OK, OK. As for weblogs out there in the greatest blogsphere, I recommed MyIrony.com, always a stimulating read with the right dose of humor. Then there's also xtcian, whose author, Ian Williams, is currently on a cross-country road trip. And if it is about published authors doing some weblogging on the side, my hat's off to Steven Johnson; when I grow up et cetera.

Thanks to Dave Pollard for pointing out this little introspection exercise.