Remember blogs?

My first blog was a food blog. It didn't amount to much, but it got me in the habit of putting stuff out there.

And putting stuff out there matters.

I hate to get nostalgic, but I remember a time when blogs had a certain magical quality about them. Like, before all the advertisements and the monetization. When people wrote them without any notion that they might make money off of them.

The best ones were like great garage bands.

How soon things changed.

For the last year, I've considered starting a podcast. Because, of course I have. But despite the fact that I've got quite a lot of experience in audio production, I have zero faith in my ability to be a ten-cent Terry Gross. Because if I did have a podcast, it would have to be an interview-style show. I've always loved those types of programs. But, if a radio-style format had been right for me, I'd have done it already. I guess it just seems like too much work. And I don't really have a radio voice.

What I do have in an insatiable need to write. And so I've spent the last several years writing articles, and writing book chapters, and writing blurbs, and reviews, and technical briefs, and data standards and scientific reports, and poems, and songs. I even wrote a manual for a role playing game.

When I was in kindergarten, they told my mother that I had something called hyperlexia. Don't be impressed. It basically just meant that I could fluently read very advanced texts and not comprehend a damn thing I'd read. But even as a kid I found that if I did not read, I'd get fidgety and get headaches. Eventually this carried over to writing.

I used to write constantly. Stories. Comic book tales. I'd sometimes read the classifieds in the back of the newspaper and write my own funny classifieds modeled after them. Several times I started and then gave up the quest to write my own language. I was just obsessed with the written word.

In middle school I started writing songs. They always turned out to be these endless free association types things. After college, I wrote a novel. But I ended up not liking the final version. So I shelved it and I wrote another novel. I ended up just enjoying the act of writing fiction – never doing it in order to share with anyone else or to make money. I just found a kind a peace in the act of doing it. Writing was like my yoga.

So, I was ready for blogs. They made sense to me. It was all about the written word. I loved blogrolls and the idea of getting RSS updates whenever one of the other bloggers I'd follow would publish something new. I loved the comments sections (at least before they started getting spammed and trolled).

So, for what it's worth, I wanted to get back to blogging. I wanted to get back to sharing on a regular basis. I wanted to come back to the written word.

It had to be the written word.