Blog on blog
I don’t write much about blogging. Why I do it. What I like about it. What I don’t. I’ve come to consider “blogging about blogging” as a disjointed experience, like stopping to explain a joke to someone (“…see the Irish are known for their drinking, so, unlike the English and the German guy, the Irish guy takes the fly out of his beer and squeezes it to get his beer back. He’s not concerned about the fly being in the beer, just how much it drank. Get it?”). Anyway, it’s Saturday afternoon and I still have this cold and there’s not much else on my mind, except maybe having a beer.
I’m still a relatively new and somewhat unwitting player in the blogging world. Tomorrow is my two-month anniversary. (Stop by for some cookies and punch.) Two months. It doesn’t seem like a lot of time, except that I wasn’t writing at all before I started the blog. There were a million reasons why not; none of them valid. For the last two months I feel like I have done nothing but write.
I had a writing life before this one – and I got paid for it! Those were the days. I had my own humor column in a weekly newspaper in Fairfax County, Virginia. I loved writing my column. Thrived on the Friday deadlines. But the years marched on and there were other pressures on my time, like family and having a real job (oh yeah, that). I wrote the newspaper column for about three years and then I just kind of burnt out and went quiet. For a long time.
The desire to get back to writing has been with me for quite a while now. Over the past year, I have started writing many stories, gotten distracted, abandoned them, started on some new ones, and on and on. I knew the time was right to get back to writing more determinately. When I wrote for the newspaper I used to motivate myself to meet deadlines with this thought: “you’ve got a humor column to write, damn it; it’s time to get serious.” What I needed now to get back on track with my writing was some kind of self-imposed deadline.
The idea of starting a blog came from my friend Matt. He encouraged me to go out on the internet and set one up. It’s simple, he said, and maybe you’ll write more. Won’t people read it? I asked him. Nah, he said. The dirty liar. After I thought about it and went out to look at some blogs, I realized that readership was what I was really missing. There is nothing like readers to entice a writer to give a little extra of himself. In my case, maybe even finish a story every once in a while.
This approach has paid off. I am writing every day again. This is the key to success in writing: you have to do it every day. Once you establish that rhythm, the ideas start to pour out. A friend asked me recently, “where the hell did that idea for the ‘witch lawyer’ come from?” I don’t really know. I had finished everything I had to do around the house that day, my kid was in bed, I pulled out my laptop – it was time to write, and that was the first thing that popped into my head, apropos of nothing. It’s often that way. The well-thought-out story ideas sketched out on paper are actually the hardest stories for me to write; it’s the surprising stuff that pops into my head that finds its way to publication first. And it’s this random thought process that gives me the most pleasure. Sometimes I laugh out loud as I am writing. These are the moments I live for and when I know I’m on to something good.
Not everything works. What the reader of this blog should keep in mind is that I am always experimenting with humor. You may laugh at a story I’ve written or you may not like it at all. No matter. What I really hope is that when you click away from here you are thinking, “well, that was different.” It isn’t easy to have a fresh comedic idea. The notion that there is “nothing new under the sun” is in part true. Increasingly, I don’t find jokes funny. By jokes I mean “guy walks into a bar with a duck on his shoulder…” It’s all derivative. Every joke reminds me of another one just like it. And in the age of the internet, every joke reminds me of another one someone sent me five minutes ago. For humor to affect me these days it needs to come from good story telling. Abstract thinking. Layering. Walk me down an unfamiliar road – then smack me on the head with something totally unexpected. Anyway, that’s what this blog is all about: an unexpected smack in the head. In case you were wondering.
Speaking of the unexpected, there are two things about the blogging world that really surprise me. One is the number of people I have met and grown to like through the process of writing this blog: blog friends (blends?). Blogging, it turns out, is not just writing your own journal, but contributing ideas and encouragement to others as well. I am grateful to the cast of characters that drop by here regularly. They encourage and inspire me. I try to do the same for them.
The second unexpected thing about blogging for me is more disturbing. The truth is, the blog world overwhelms me. It is boundless and unstructured; hyperlinking around it makes me anxious. There is an energy exacted from my body every time I hop scotch from one site to the next. I don’t really feel it until I get about three hyperlinks from my own home page. Then I get all wiggy and have to shut down my computer and go outside and sit in a tree. It’s that speck of dust in a limitless universe feeling. Don’t like it. Don’t like it at all.
So, if it seems to you like this blog exists in its own world, well, that’s probably because the author of this blog lives in his own world and he doesn’t like to leave it. I will get around to visiting your blog if I haven’t already (especially if you keep coming around here and making a pest of yourself). In the meantime, keep writing.
4:57:36 PM 
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