Elevating Substance…

I’ve been meaning to get my online persona back in circulation for a few months now and just hadn’t gotten around to it.  Over the past few weeks, though, I realized –  for reasons that will probably make more sense to me over time – that now feels like a good time to start up again. And, being aware of the fact that I can be pretty lazy at heart, and often stick with stuff I enjoy simply because I’ve built up the momentum to keep doing it, I’m seizing this opportunity from myself, so to speak.  The mental transition from static to kinetic can be a bumpy one, quite obviously, because doing stuff takes more effort than not doing stuff. But when I finally sat down and contemplated – in more than a half-assed way for a change – getting this little fora off the ground, and remembered that starting up a blog isn’t exactly a monumental effort, I concluded that the time was right to launch.  So here I am.

Broadcasting online isn’t an entirely new thing for me, I guess, but something that, upon reflection, I’d been doing for longer than I appreciated at the time when I finally stopped.  I kept up a Livejournal between maybe 2002 and 2005, slowly migrating my daily musings over to MySpace once I went back to school and once I decided that Livejournal had become an internet relic of sorts.  (I’m assuming it’s still up and running and whatnot, but it doesn’t seem like it had the presence it once did.)  A lot of friends and I kept in touch online that way back then, and it was a fun, easy way to maintain our  repartee en masse.  Often the reactions or input or comments I’d get from friends in response to things that I wrote would be funny, or informative, or good for me to hear, or the like. Having looked back over some of my later (Myspace) archives, though, I see that I basically trailed off at some point and stopped posting anything of any real depth, creativity, thought, humor, or personal emotional import.

Anything of substance, for lack of a better word.

In retrospect, my disinterest in keeping up with the whole thing probably occurred for a number of reasons.  For one, putting your blog on a social networking site guarantees that you’re sabotaging any chance at anonymity, which anonymity I’ve secured here and will probably maintain for the time being.  No, I’m not a convicted child rapist or fat or ugly anything. Please. I just feel the less self-censoring I have to do here, the more fun I’ll have posting again, the more honest I’ll be in doing so, and hopefully the more fun it will be to read.

Honestly, I never much cared if people could associate my online ramblings with the actual, real life me.  As a practical matter, I tapered off posting my daily musings in large part because I moved, started a new job, and tried to get into the swing of things here in New York, which city, in and of itself, can take a bit of effort.  My work schedule got mind-numbingly crazy… My personal schedule lost any sense of routine or normalcy… Etc.  One of the first casualties of my apoplectic day-to-day was that I stopped writing about things that I was thinking about or doing or found funny, much less writing contemporaneously about things that I was thinking about or doing or found funny.

But I’m pretty acclimated to my new environs these days, and sorta miss keeping track of what I’m up to.  Suffice it to say that my schedule in NY still hasn’t agreed to comport with the whole “routine” concept.  As an added bonus, then, to entertaining the blogosphere with my rapier wit, I’ll also have a more coherent record of what the hell I do with my time. The ever-present pile of scrunched up bar tabs, random receipts, and mystery phone numbers on the table by my front door just isn’t cutting it anymore. I mean, I can’t lie – it’s a pretty inefficient way of marking the passage of time, much less discrete units of it.  Normally if you ask me on Tuesday what I did the prior Saturday I’m at a total fucking loss, and the last thing I want to do is sift through that pile to reconstruct my weekend.

Now… What the hell to write about?

When I first considered re-introducing myself into the bloggy fray, I had myriad half-baked ideas about what I might “do” with my blog, and whether I should have some sort of theme or ground rules. What I wanted to accomplish or gain more than simply the catharsis of writing and posting; whether I wanted to adopt – if even in a vague or sporadic sense – some sort of contrived persona through whose filter I could write; who I hoped or thought might read what I wrote; what sort of dialogues I thought I might establish or possibly have with the people reading (if there turned out to be any at all, a question regarding which the jury is, of course, still out).  All that stuff.

But I’ve kinda decided to say, “Fuck it.” I’ve set this little spot up so I can more or less spew without repercussion, and I suppose that’s what I’ll do.

Here goes…