Long Time No Blog

So I am going to pull the dubious move of blogging about not blogging, on the assumption that it is preferable to not blogging at all. I have not, in fact, disappeared off of the face of the Earth. Blogs are funny things, in that they feel old and stale if not regularly updated. That’s funny because not every blog is based on current events. Mine, for example, is based on whatever the hell I feel like writing about at the moment. I started it solely for the purpose of having a place to do that, publicly. I told myself that I would write on it when, and only when I felt like it, regardless of the reading public (should there be one). Yet, for the past few months, the BLOG has been lurking somewhere in my lower brain, heaving and seething and humidly accusing me of slackerdom for not updating it more regularly.

When you think about it, a blog like mine is no more in danger of staleness than is a collection of essays sitting on a shelf. These anecdotes and thoughts and memoirs aren’t time-bound. So shut up, BLOG! I am not beholden to ye. Over the Summer, I had an embarrassment of free time, so I blogged a lot. It’s Fall now, and with Fall come Obligations and Agendas. I am obliged to make money by teaching people to read and write, and my big, overarching agenda these days is to get paid to write, which has necessitated my writing, editing and hustling stuff other than this blog.

Also, enough with this word “blog.” It doesn’t really fit what I’m doing here—I’m not “logging” anything. And the neologism is a little misleading, in that it makes the “blog” seem like a completely new medium, when in fact it is nothing more than a public forum for publishing whatever you want to. It’s wide open. It doesn’t need to be daily, necessarily, or political, or hip, or targeted at a niche market. It’s words, images, video on a page. It logs chronologically because it’s designed that way—actually that’s the problem. If the software automatically organized writings by subject, length, text color and other categories, and did not prioritize them by recentness, there would be no reason to feel guilty for not updating the thing constantly.

Ah. There. I have expiated the guilt, reopened the floodgates of consciousness and creativity—feng shui-d the shit into a workable chi-circulation system. Things are flowing again. Phew.