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Friday, May 27, 2011

At my post


I'd like to think that, although my blog posts are pretty random, I am a pretty consistent blogger. I will have been blogging for seven years come this August. And I hope to post my thousandth post sometime this year (which will probably be as anticlimactic as Judgement Day was).

One of the anomalies of blogging versus writing a book is that people reading a blog (or stumbling into one) start reading from the end versus the beginning. I realize that is a very linear way of looking at it, but it is true. Although very few people actually read a blog for the first time and then jump back to the first post to catch up. This is especially true in my case. It would be a lot to expect for someone to read almost a thousand of my archived posts to discover how I got to where I am.

I've toyed with creating printed versions of my blog. I have created photo books using blurb.com, an online self-publishing system. I even began creating a book called the Best of Dizgraceland that I shelved because of the need to truly prioritize my very limited free time for things other than creating a vanity press version of a blog no one reads so that it can become a printed version that no one would read even if they were willing to plunk down the rather pricey cost of a blurb book.

It's not as though you would find a clear thread to define what it is I am trying to communicate with my blog if you read it from beginning to end (or end to beginning). You would discover that I repeat myself a great deal and harp on many of the same topics over and over (one of them being the frustrations of writing a blog no one reads on a regular basis).

I've recapped much of my childhood and climbed my family tree on more than one occasion. But I found that sharing too much information on the Web can be an unwise thing to do. So I stopped naively blathering away about everything as though I was writing in my diary oblivious that it could be read by anyone with an Internet connection.

I'm smart enough not to write about work. Not that I have any interest in writing about my work. I blog to escape from thinking about my work. I also don't write about my wife or children here. I write about my life as a father in another private blog locked away from prying eyes.

I don't write about being away on vacation for the same reason I stopped checking in on Four Square. Common sense tells us that it is better not to broadcast to the world when you are away from your house and for how long. You might as well tell thieves which rock your front door key is hidden under.

Taking away much of my personal life as topics for blogging has definitely narrowed the scope of my subject matter. Sometimes I think I have just run out of things to write about. And then some whack job like Harold Camping comes along and gives me fodder for several posts. I'd be up a creek if he actually got raptured.

So, I'm not sure whether after almost seven years blogging, I've come to the conclusion why I do it. I don't harbor any fantasy that there would be a major outcry if I stopped. Pebbles don't make much of a ripple in a very large pond. But I stay at my post. There is a certain amount of satisfaction that I hang in there putting one foot in front of another.

Who knows, maybe someday I'll actually get somewhere.

1 comment:

Nachtigall said...

Not to sound cliche, but it is the journey and not the destination... I break all of those blog rules -- I have blogged about work and blogged about family and blogged about my personal life.... most of it is anonymous, although many of my followers do know me personally. It is a diary for me, of sorts. A way to creatively vent or rant or brag about all those little things in life that would seem to eat me up otherwise. And sometimes I have to delete things because I am horrified at my own level of bitchiness. Ah well. As you say, plod forward. What else is there, really?