Wading in the Velvet Sea

Then again, maybe it’s simply a numbers issue. I mean, my future godson has a blog, and he’s four months old. The entries are mostly garbled type with JPEGs of his most recent vomit, but still, he’s got one. Everyone’s got one. Hard to find quality in such quantity. As such, a few good ones rise to the top, and just like with the oeuvre of Maroon 5, enough core people decided to like these particular sites and sheep-like everyone went along with them. I mean, nothing against these sits, but it’s not entirely original to link someone like Instapundit or DailyKos.

Then again, maybe it’s a content issue. Those two sites are political blogs, and those tend to generate the most buzz, the most heat, the most traffic, because if blogs allow people from all over the world to communicate from great distances, it also allows such communication to devolve into some form of “YOUR MUTHA” before long. And that’s the majority of the poliblogs for me. As a politically moderate guy, I look at both extremes (and that’s all these blogs seem to be, no matter what they say), I just end up sounding like Brick Tamlin amidst all the noise: “I don’t know what we’re yelling about!”

Then again, maybe it’s a positioning issue. I don’t know many other blogs like mine. Not trumpeting my innovation or anything, I just don’t. I don’t even much like assigning the name “blog” to it, since I don’t really take advantage of the tools of the blog world (tags, links, RSS feeds, etc). I slapped a “/blog” onto my home page 3 years ago fresh from my tenure over on Blogger and went forth. Along the way, I became less interested in positioning myself amidst the blog world and more interested in carving out my own space alongside it. I don’t think what I do is better or worse, just different. I like what I do, it interests me, and let’s be honest, this type of output is only possible if it’s interesting to the writer. (I couldn’t put out 35 political posts a day, nor could those writers have the energy to spend 3,000 words relating their life to Bob Dylan records on a random Tuesday night. Only so many hours in the day.)

Then again, maybe it’s all a non-issue. Hard to tell. I started this off thinking I’d do some humorous “Top 5 Ways to Cash In On My New Traffic”, but I got a bit lost on the way. Having the financial situation to solely blog would be one sweet lifestyle, no doubt, but I’m mostly in a place now where I’m happy to have my little space to chat. Maybe I could sell a few ads, but that wouldn’t allow me to sit in my Pac-Man footsie pajamas all day. Maybe I could hope that some big-shot editor would stumble across my site while searching for online porn and say, “Mildred, get me this man on the phone! I have a six-figure salary I need to dump on someone, and might as well be him!”

I could of course actively pimp myself out for a writing-based income, but I’m not so good with the self-pimping. Self-primping? No problem. But self-pimping is hard for me. Having a website branded with my own name may lead you to think I’ve got a big ego, but sadly, not so much. More about the “hiding behind the screen and doing the Christian Slater in ‘Pump Up the Volume’” thing. This is me turned up to 11. In all directions. It’s a happier me or a funnier me or a snarkier me or a sadder me, depending on the day. All me, but me to some extreme or the other, something pretty far out from center. For some reason this avenue allows me to get to that different place, and it’s fun to be there for a bit each day, and I hope it’s an interesting place for you to visit each day.

For now, I’ll continue the everyday journey to the fringe. That fringe doesn’t have astute commentary on the John Roberts nomination, and it sure as hell won’t have any “today I went shopping, and then I came home, and then I unpacked, and omigod, like traffic was like, SO bad, what IS it with people” anecdotes, but it will have things that are interesting to me, things I think you’ll be interested in reading, and for now, that’s enough.