Tuesday, March 19, 2002
With no help from Blogger — which has screwed up 2x in the past ten minutes.
So, several people (including Mr. Michael Coté) noticed that I destroyed my previous weblog. Well, not destroyed exactly — just removed. I hadn’t been updating it and I thought the last few posts I made blew, so I decided in a fit of general frustration with the world to just abandon the whole project. And not without reason. Let me explain:
First, I’m not a programmer (right now) like most of you and, as such, I actually don’t spend most of my working day in front of a computer. When I take mental breaks at work, I don’t hunt down cool web sites, and I don’t check seven different weblogs. I can’t. I have to do decidedly unhip things like go get a Dr Pepper and look out the window at downtown Austin or go take a walk to Congress and get a cup of coffee. A couple weeks ago I got my library card renewed on a break (since I’m right across the street from the Faulk Library). This doesn’t really prove anything, just that I find myself, these days, usually going to the web to accomplish specific tasks and not for the semi-random roaming about that most weblogging seems to cater to.
Second — and this is probably the more important issue — I consider myself to be (in some form) a writer. Like, a guy who thinks about words and tries to polish his own style with the dream of someday becoming published, and I think most web writing and, in fact, the web browsing experience as a whole is essentially antithetical to the art of creative writing. Writing on the internet (and weblogs, especially) is generally 1) draft-level writing, posted quickly (like this), 2) geared towards the shortest possible attention span, living in a world where the reader can (and will, no doubt) click away the moment his or her thoughts get grabbed by something else, and 3) rarely about anything relevent to my world, to my trying to learn about and finish the projects that I work on in my life (with the exception, of course, of friend’s weblogs, which I actaully appreciate because they let me keep up with the friend — I’ll come back to this in a sec). So, in my cranky mood, I read over my more recent posts, decided they sucked, and I decided that I wasn’t going to help perpetuate this nonsense. Other people can create and consume this crap, this mental fast food, but I’m outta here. The world doesn’t need another Metafilter or Memepool. And (with the few exceptions of my friends) the world doesn’t really need to know about Josh’s latest thoughts about driving across town in inclement weather or eating dinner with his family. You really don’t, world. My thoughts aren’t really that profound.
A maybe a new air of mystery will make me seem sexier in a rebellious sort of way. Do you find yourself experiencing the unexplainable urge to sleep with me? That’s what I thought.
So anyway. Everyone and their band’s bass player has a weblog these days and most of them don’t have much to say. But I’ve decided to keep up the weblog, though in a less webloggy way. I feel that one of the coolest things about the weblogging experience is being able to keep up with the lives of friends who you no longer get to see in person regularly. Brenna and Eric Parent, in particular (for me) and Zane (though he’s in town quite often). And, then, as Coté points out, those of you who do surf at work might rather take the time to check up on friends instead of taking the latest hip “What * am I?” test. So I’ll preiodically update this page with what’s going on in Joshland, keeping the content strictly to happenings off the web. You’ll probably read about the Austin Museum of Digital Arts some, my highly-stressful thesis (a source of some of the angst coming across right here, no doubt), my experiences as the hottest local electronic act since Fat John and His Fabulous Box, and possibly some talk about movies I’ve seen and books I’m reading. I will not fucking comment on the latest news article about some shitty thing George W. Bush is doing.
Maybe my posting style will degenerate back into quick little two-sentence quips, but I hope not. I’d actually like to turn this into something that will help improve my writing style instead of destroy it.
Okay. If you’ve read this far, great. I hope you understand where I’m coming from and, before I end this, I want to make one more point: Posting to a weblog is like dumping words into deep space where, as far as you’re concerned, they’ll probably never be heard from again. With a few exceptions, I never get any feedback one way or another about what I say (though I did get a bunch of interesting feedback when I removed the blog). If you like what I write, send me a message every once in a while responding to some stuff I say. That’ll be the currency with which you can pay me to continue writing here.
So. Yes, I’m cranky. No, not at you.
