I got a blog y'all

It’s taken quite a few attempts over the years to start this blog, and as many weeks in the recent past of grasping for a manageable writing project to fill a seemingly wide-open space in life, to finally get down to business and pen the inaugural entry into what will hopefully evolve into something actually worth reading. As I learned with my last writing project, the quick failure (but personal success? maybe? eventual success? perhaps.) of NaNoWriMo, I like to just get the beginning part out of the way and hope the meat of the thing is worth enough to make you forget it. I think I once knew how to write a killer lead, whether for an editorial or a short story, but the key element there is patience and tiresome effort. Frankly, that sort of effort is reserved for other things these days, like, searching for things on the internet that are better than my blog.

A while back I had a sort of unpublished blog in the form of witty e-mails I sent to my friends about my adventures as a townie when I moved back in with my parents after college. I’m not sure I have something as distinct or comical to write about these days, and I may come across as scattered, but I hope some kind of theme emerges without me having to try too hard. Confession: generally the most well-received things I’ve ever written have been accidents.

Early last summer I went on a series of bad dates and toyed with the idea of chronicling my bad luck on a blog, but I grew weary of going on bad dates and just got more careful – and quickly ran out of material. Well, I still go on comically bad dates sometimes, but I can’t count on that enough to be blog fodder for months to come (I hope). The townie thing works, but only in small doses I think. I considered writing about music but much of the best of it eludes me; music writers, or great ones, have to have their ears to the ground in a way that intimidates me and I’m not afraid to admit it. And don’t let anyone tell you differently – it takes a lot of time and money to even be an amateur music critic. The glory days of the 1960’s where anybody could take in a show at your local basement club or buy a secondhand record and write a review of it, then send it in to Rolling Stone and actually have it published, are gone. That world grows larger and more accessible everyday and in turn music writing becomes less so. Every indie rock critic agrees on 9 out of the 10 best albums of the year but they all have to have that ONE rabbit to pull out of the hat that shows they listened to every underground EP that you did and all the ones you didn’t. I am not that person. Same for television and movies. There is so much great television out there that I don’t watch because I don’t have the time, and important movies I haven’t seen because they cost $10 and I’m cheap. When I see one, I’ll tell you about it. But the last time I paid for my own movie ticket was… not in 2010.

In the introduction to the book Crazy Salad, a collection of articles Nora Ephron wrote about the feminist movement for Esquire back in the seventies, she says, “For a while there I wrote about women.” I daydream about that sentence. I’ll not have that singularity of focus, and I clearly won’t be able to begin things in the graceful, nonchalant way that she can. But if you get nothing else out of this, just go read that book and give me credit for pointing you toward it. It’s fantastic.

As for my own self-indulgent musings on culture, and pop culture, and anecdotes about my own misadventures, I just hope to be entertaining. And if I’m lucky I succeeded in my endeavor here, which was leaving nowhere to go but up…