Tuesday October 07, 2003 at  2:08 PM

My Life as a Blog

Appearing in  Blogging & Writing

And so there you are one day in March when you get the urge to start a blog because it looks like fun and well, you’re really frustrated a lot of things going on in the world what with the impending war in Iraq and the tax cuts and the looming deficits and global warming and SUVs somehow getting bigger and bigger and the constant stream of apocalyptic environmental news that pops up nearly every day and your kids growing up faster than you ever thought they would and you feel sort of powerless, helpless even a bit hopeless about it all so you get this idea that if you wrote about it you might feel better because somehow writing always seems to help you make sense of things even if it doesn’t seem that things are ever really going to make too much sense.

So you download MovableType and you stay up late even though you should be sleeping because the kids are getting up early regardless of whether you’re rested or not but still you keep going until you’ve configured your server and privileged the files and mastered the template tags and found a layout to steal..er…borrow…and finally you’re ready, up and running, a real blogger making your first post and watching the server logs just expecting the Web to beat a path to your door because you just know you’ve got something to original and witty and interesting to say and people will find you, oh sure they will, they’ll just magically find you because after all, you’re on the Web. Or maybe not.

But you keep writing and you keep posting and somehow stuff starts to accumulate and you notice your site is growing and that you’re getting close to something like a body of work only it’s not a giant body it’s more like an armadillo’s body but still you’ve put together 50 postings and even if that’s not as much as one of those guys that have been online since like the invention of the Internet it’s more than you wrote last year and somehow it does make you feel better and you notice how it’s sort of become a part of your life and how you spend more time thinking about it than you ever intended and you realize that it’s actually taking a LOT of time and that this writing stuff is really hard because you’re actually sort of serious about it and you don’t want to just come off like a crank because nobody really likes to read cranks except people already inclined to the crank’s perspective and that’s not really all that interesting so you keep working at it and trying some different ideas and amazingly it turns out to be pretty dang satisfying but mostly for its own reasons because it’s clear by now that you’re not going to get famous from this but even so you’re getting noticed by somebody because every now and again some random comment gets posted from a guy in England or a couple of high-school girls from somewhere which is pretty gratifying in a bizarre online sort of way even though your wife and your parents will never understand because the whole concept of an online life is just too dang weird for them.

And then something really strange happens when you’re at a party and somebody starts talking to you about something you wrote a few weeks ago only you can’t actually remember what you wrote a few weeks ago because that was like, a few weeks ago, and then it occurs to you that somebody might actually be paying attention and that those numbers on the server logs — the ones you check WAY more often than you should — those numbers are actual people who are actually reading and may even be actually enjoying what they’re reading and perhaps you’re starting to develop a readership which is pretty exciting but also a little disconcerting since that readership sometimes escapes from your online world and shows up in your offline world which is something like meeting a childhood friend at some random bus stop in Bolivia: sort of surprising, sort of weird, sort of fun.

And then you look up and notice that it’s nearly noon and you’ve got to finish this post because you’ve been working on it for a lot longer than you planned but not as long as that last one you wrote — THAT one took forever or like three days or something — and so as you finish up what turns out to be your 50th post and you think back over the last six months you realize that it’s been a fun ride even if it wasn’t exactly what you expected and that you actually like this writing thing and that you wish you coudl figure out how to get paid for it so you could justify doing more of it but mostly you think about how somebody might actually read this and how you hope they enjoy it but even if they don’t, it was still a lot of fun.

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