Wait a minute, buddy, you just did some jackassin'—you can't shut up now.

There’s a big difference between a journal & a blog. One can keep a journal to work things out in one’s mind, to record events or those tiny workaday revelations you’d probably otherwise forget, for the sheer love of writing or just to give the brain a workout. Whatever the purpose, it’s understood that subject & audience are one & the same, & in the vast majority of cases it stays that way for eternity.

Keeping a blog, though, is like reading one’s journal out loud through a megaphone. It presupposes that there’s something inherently fascinating about the writer’s mind in a way that a book or poem doesn’t—after all, no editor, or any other abiter, is going to provide any feedback about these words before I hit the “Post“ button & send them wheeling out towards whatever reader is luckless enough to stumble into their path. That presumption is all on the writer’s part—that is, on my part—& in that sense I can’t help but recoil from the idea, the same way I recoil from the folks who go on Oprah because they think their life-stories are just so gosh-darned fascinating, gee, who wouldn’t be spellbound by them? Even worse, it’s damned unlikely that I’d use such a public space to spell out my most abiding worries or fears, my sex-fantasies or nightmares—things that are normally thought to help define a person as an individual. What that leaves me with then is my “opinions,” in a medium that’s already crawling like maggots w/opinions, takes, predictions, interpretations, & a million other forms of talking out one’s ass. And opinions about what? Movies? Politics? Baseball? Life? All this shit that anyone who knows me can already recite by heart?

Nor does it help that there’s something inavoidably faddish about the very notion of blogging—nothing’s easier than picturing some graduate student 50 years from now doing his Master’s on the quaint little craze that infected so many people at the birth of the Internet. O, how they’ll chuckle (before dozing off) over Joe Schmoe’s tirades against Bill Gates! Either that, or else the blogging craze will continue to grow until everyone is doing it, including your Aunt Myrtle, thereby rendering it really moot. Along w/all the goddam talk-shows, call-in shows, & reality-TV shows, blogging seems to be waving on the ultimate consummation of Warhol’s 15-minutes-of-fame prediction (which I promise to never again mention in this space, along w/the phrases “24/7,” “The tribe has spoken,“ & “That’s what I’m talkin’ about“). The only thing is, Andy Warhol never had reason to believe that the 15 minutes might happen only in our minds.

Anyway, this is all by way of saying that I’m not yet totally sold on this blogging business, & if I go for periods of time without contributing much here, well, it’ll either be due to that or else to my innate laziness. You figure it out.