Why
I guess I’m blogging again and to kick off this quixotic return to form I feel the need to stew on what I’m doing here. You probably don’t need to read this, unless you’re me in the future.
I started blogging in the late 90s when the word “blog” was being coined, though I don’t think I heard the word until after I’d been doing it for a few years. For me, it was a reason to update my website, which I did because the web was new (to me) and cool (again, to me) and it just seemed kind of funny to seize the means of publication just to publish the inanities of my high school mind. In the early 2000s, it felt more like the last thread of an artistic identity I’d harbored in my teens, a public proof that I could produce, even if not all that much. I stopped blogging in the late 2000s, for reasons I didn’t document very well, but I suspect a few culprits:
- Public personal expression was becoming a bit passé with the advent of social media
- I was publicly expressing myself in passé ways on social media
- I was producing more through software
- Everyone had a blog and I was and am a contrarian
I left my un-updated blog available for a long time, partly out of pride, and partly out of a belief that the Internet should be indelible. Both of those impulses eroded with age and at some point I just decided not to keep paying my hosting provider. Since then, what we might call blogging has largely faded back into the technical circles whence it came, superseded in the popular mediasphere by more visual forms and, in the realm of text, more enclosed platforms bent on audience capture. Blogging in 2025 feels somewhere between the affectation of the guy writing poetry on a typewriter at the farmer’s market and the atavistic Luddite impulse of an off-the-grid communalist. I have to admit I don’t read anyone else’s blog. I can think of almost no friends I have that would want to write one, or would consent to do it in public if they did. It is, flatly, a weird hobby.
Weird hobbies are cool, though. We should do things we enjoy, even if they’re ridiculous or irrelevant, even if no one else cares. I am writing because I enjoy it (the required thinking and the embodied act), and I’m doing it in public because the imaginary reader enforces a level of rigor I struggle to achieve with private journaling… even if the risk of the pillory is significantly elevated from that of the early aughts. And, y’know, fuck it, I’m old. I like a website. I find vertical video painful. Writing a “weblog” is the kind of old thing expected of an old like me. And like Chief Wiggum said, “If it feels good, do it.” Please don’t snap my undies, though.