Blogging With a Possibly Completely Obscure Purpose or Something

How to pick a lock, for those of you interested in breaking & entering.

I was recently trying to think of a good use for my personal time and I had what seemed a wickedly good idea: starting a local chapter for furries who like to fondle mannequins in basements. Then I realized I was terrified of furries and unwilling to share my mannequins and conceived of a blog dedicated to my learning one fundamental, useful thing a month. Some essential skill, or discipline. I got this idea while poking around on YouTube and watching a bunch of "how-to" videos (see above). Many of them were about completely useless, gadget-y stuff, which was surprisingly deeply appealing to the cave-dwelling, mammoth-slaying arrowhead-carver wearing pelts in my soul.

Some of the following basic and vital areas came to mind:

CARS--I come from a long line of men who know how to fix and/or build things, including cars. I was always under the impression that my father, however, hated this (especially farting around with cars) and I never made much of an effort at it, even though I discovered in my 20s that I had a minor mechanical aptitude, after all. But what if I really made a study of home car repair? I never have, snobbishly agreeing with dad's disdain (even though he's a highly-skilled fixer and builder of stuff) and investing far too much in my education in heady shit like opera. And the truth is, the inner workings of car engines do fascinate me. Seeing how everything connects, how cleverly (or in some cases, ridiculously) engineers have designed products to specs that let them comfortably fit under the hood of your average 2 ton sedan is an intellectual pursuit of its own kind. Try changing the bulb in the headlamp of your average minivan and you quickly realize this shit is for real. There's a whole history behind the baroque design of that headlamp and how it is protected from the elements. There is easily a full year of blogging the meticulous and grubby details of cars and their care and repair, much less a month. There is also, as my wife wisely noted, a shit-ton of money to be spent on such an endeavor, money that might be better spent on meaningless bullshit like food, rent and utilities.

MARTHA STEWART SHIT--It's the 21st Century and men no longer need to feel like they've handed in their man card (and penis) if they can keep a mean house. It's perfectly okay for a man to know his way around  what I think of as "Martha Stewart Shit"--household decoration, organizing, cleaning, clutter removal, minor household repair, etc (actual poop? not involved). I point this out because my dad sure as hell didn't agree with that view until he and mom got old and her rheumatoid arthritis became too painful for her to manage much around the house anymore. That was when dad manned up, got hep to the housekeeping tip and hired a lady to come in twice a week.

I know how to do most of the necessary, basic stuff already, sometimes well (except cooking, but that's really a separate subject--see below). There is an art to keeping things not just neat but uncluttered, clean and presentable. Most days, though, no one in my household, including me, pays much attention to that. We're messy folks, and the messiness is compounded by having two children on the autism spectrum who seem constitutionally incapable of remembering to do much past flushing each time they use the potty (and we're still working on that, really). They are both precocious computer users and gifted artists, but forget about expecting them to remember when to take a bath or reminding themselves to change clothes now and then. Ultimately, I don't want to become a better housekeeper because I want to be Mr. Mom; I want to have a good knowledge base and a little extra moral authority (at the moment I have none, about anything) to back me up when I bitch about the house being a mess.

FOOD/KITCHEN--I say food/kitchen here and not "cooking" because it's all of a piece. To me, you need to know your stuff beginning in the grocery store all the way through cleaning up afterwards. I can handle the grocery shopping right now just fine. I can handle the clean-up. Cooking? Eh... I suck as a human being and since my wife is a good cook and seems to like doing it sometimes, I just let her. She doesn't believe I've ever cooked before but I have, and what I learned when I cooked was this: cooking drives me crazy. I suddenly turn into the anal-retentive chef and it's just horrible. I can't tear myself away from the kitchen and I fuss and worry over every tiny thing and it's just all really tense and no one wants to eat when I'm done not because the food is bad but because I've turned into King Shit of Asshole Mountain. I figure if I spent some concentrated time really learning my way around and getting comfortable with multi-tasking in the kitchen, I might relax a little and pull more of my weight at home at the stove. Plus, home-cooking is just good for you, psychologically and probably physically as well. I like to see the 4 sticks of butter that go into my morning bowl of chocolate chip cookies.

Those were some of the basic things I thought I might cover. Each in its own right could be a horrifically boring blog all its own, of course, but if I went the one subject a month route there'd be more variety and I'd add in less everyday stuff that's more specific, like drink-mixing, lawn care and taxidermy, for all the fuck I know.

No, I'm kidding, I wouldn't do mixology if you held a gun to my head. I know two shots of vodka in a coke and that's good enough for me.

I still like my overall idea but I've begun to doubt my ability to pull it off. There's my wife's point about money and there's my tendency to mess with good ideas like my cat messes with mice: she gets all excited, chases them around, plays with them, chases them some more and ultimately loses them down an air vent before she goes back to pooping in the tub. That's me with ideas, except the losing them down the air vent part.

So the question as to whether or not this blog will become more informative (and active) in the New Year is up in the air. And also, I've recently realized that at some point in all my flighty-ass Tumbling and Twittering I abandoned the first principles that led to me sometimes writing blog posts and articles for money: write about the stuff that interests me. I started a true crime blog lo these many years ago because I've always been fascinated with true crime. Less than a year after writing about true crime on a lark I was doing it for money.

So maybe I shouldn't worry so much about the subject matter, or having a themed blog that might draw a decent number of readers but perhaps not be so sustainable--maybe I should do the patently obvious thing that only people who over-think everything tend to miss: maybe I should just write about stuff that interests me.

Or maybe I should give into my impulse to really study arcane shit like picking locks. Not because that one neighbor's back door is so testy, no. Just to, well, know.


Whatever I decide, I'll go on too long about it here shortly, I'm sure.