You didn’t know I was experimenting this time, did you?
The truth is that after however long it’s been — looking at the archives there it would seem to indicate a shocking eight years — a fellow wonders whether his hundred-and-twenty hosting dollars per year are being well-spent. Am I being entertaining, am I being interesting, is there any point to this whole journalling/web-siting/blogging business? What am I trying to accomplish? What the hooting hell is the point, if I can’t even answer basics like those?
So I decided to just change venues. Just to see what would happen, you know? To get a feel for whether it was the air, the webspace, the template, whatever, that was keeping me to ridiculous timelines and ramming me headlong into writer’s blocks.
Wouldn’t you know, I banged out a good solid month of very simple content, basically without effort. I snuck it out before work, after work, after the gym, in the morning, whenever I could. Most of it isn’t what I’d call thoughtful, but it stood in evidence of what I could do if I wasn’t trying all that hard — and begged the question of what I could accomplish if I were.
Not that I’m going to declare this a great re-launch of any kind, but rather just an unloading of the pressure I’m placing entirely on myself. Instead, I’m going to enjoy this for what it is: My forum to my friends and my readers, however many of you have survived, and just roll from there.
Did you know I got two thousand pages read over on my Live Spaces weblog, since the start of the year? How the hell did that happen? Two thousand. Pretty good for a site I didn’t publicize, except for one link off to the side of an old template. All from just writing natural, spontaneous, simple stuff.
I remember reading a quote from Jim Unger in a foreword to one of his Herman collections, talking about being funny. He was often asked how he was so funny, and his answer was that sometimes you were and sometimes you weren’t, but that “being funny is like breathing. The harder you try to do it, the sooner you find yourself gasping on the ground.”
Look at the long gaps in my archives there, and you’ll see an extended period of me trying to be funny. I think I’d rather just take my chances with a daily average, rather than pay my hosting money to carefully maintain a site that updates quarterly with five hundred words.
So, let’s see how I do.