The Great Blizzard of Twenty-Fifteen, Among Other Things

Long-time bloggy blogger and likely difficult person in general Andrew Sullivan retired from the act of blogging today.

I never regularly read Sullivan's blog after his interest in the intersection of race and IQ turned my stomach, but I did find myself sympathetic to a few things he said in his post today about the daily grind of blogging. This is all just writing, but blogging for many--I include myself in that 'many'--seems to include an inherent demand for timeliness and relevance, and that can lead to a constant feeling of being on deadline. Even if that deadline is entirely self-imposed, it does cause stress.

After I'd been blogging for the heck of it for 5 years--for fun--it took off for me in 2005 and became a job. At the time I was probably 60 lbs. overweight. By the time I backed away from blogging as I understood it for a bit (I never "retired," really) in 2009, I was a full 100 lbs overweight. My blood pressure was insanely high and my lifelong problem with insomnia was off the charts bad. I had acid reflux and my asthma, long dormant, had begun to flare again.

Not having a single-purpose blog of my own to obsess over, just a series of freelance gigs, I was able to focus on losing that weight and feeling better again. I understand Andrew Sullivan's feeling that he'll end up healthier if he steps away from this kind of every day thing. Chances are he's right.

After reading about Sullivan's quasi-retirement I tweeted a joke about my return to blogging, because this kind of endeavor is really missing the input of progressive, middle-aged white men with underlying anger issues.

Truth is, though, I really do feel more ready than I truly have in some time to do this every day. I think I'm going to try and have just one rule: not make any rules for what I put here. I mean, there are rules, sure, but I'm going to ease this space into something closer in many ways to what I was doing when I first began blogging in 2000.

Like, this post started out to be about this blizzard. We had a blizzard where I live, in Central Massachusetts, and it was a sonofabitch. Three feet of snow, full blizzard conditions for 7 hours straight. The Weather Channel dubbed it Juno, which is fine, but I like the old-fashioned Blizzard of 2015. Mostly because such a considerable storm deserves a timeless moniker like that.

The blizzard began in earnest late Monday and consumed all of Tuesday, non-stop sideways snow drifting to the tops of single-story homes. It was epic, and I enjoyed it.

I lived in the south till I was 45, and growing up in the south, snow is introduced as a treat. It's always unexpected, and because no southern city has the infrastructure to deal with it, it enforces a respite when it comes. Whether anyone wants it or not, people get a holiday. It doesn't take much, either--in 2011, five inches of snow shut down Atlanta for a solid week.

You'd think that growing up and eventually having to drive to work in snowstorms would have robbed me of my enjoyment--it did not. And I had one job in one of the few regions of the south that sees real snow on occasion that was atop a treacherous hill. Stressful as driving that hill was in the snow, I still was glad every time it began to fall.

Today I took a 2-mile walk among plowed-up mountains of snow and down alleys of snow neatly carved by hard-working snow blowers. I normally listen to music when I walk, but this was too dangerous; I needed to be able to hear oncoming vehicles, in case one lost traction and I had to dive in a drift.

Nothing much happened; I didn't even slip and fall. But I enjoyed it. The silence, the stillness. Everything cold, and calm.

This was the second historic storm to hit this city since we've lived here. I suspect there are more in store. I'm fine with that.

****

That was the blog post proper. If I do have one goal as I write more, it is to pare these down and focus them. So, let's see where this rabbit hole goes.

I forget...

... What do you put on personal blog posts? Um--my daughter is using my Mac as hers has a problem with the screen. So I borrowed my old Windows laptop, which my son usually uses. I can do that because he much prefers his iPad over the laptop and typically only uses it for a couple of specific things--mainly drawing in MS Paint.

I'm writing this on the Windows laptop and to be honest, other than some minor mechanical issues with the keyboard, I can't remember why I was so anxious to give this thing to my son (full well knowing at the time that he wasn't as into laptops as he is tablets) and get a Mac. This computer works just fine, even though it's about 4 years old and I had to revert it to Win 7 after a disastrous upgrade to 8.

I guess I'm thinking that while I love my iPad and iPhone, when it comes to laptops, I may be... a Windows guy, after all?

Curls up in ball, rocks, staring.

WTF is a blog now

Serious question--but rhetorical. So, like, don't give a direct answer in the comments. Blogs have changed. They've gone from being a primary expression of whatever online to something "omg no one is doing that now, what are you, 80?" to sort of a thing again. It's confounding.

For example, Ello is essentially a blogging site. Doesn't look like it at first. Doesn't even have to be used that way. But it is. And Twitter was called a "microblog" from its inception. While there's something jokey about that word now, it's still a pretty good description of Twitter. I use it just as I once used blogs, only Twitter's character limit and accepted practices mean I whittle away all the schmutz (that's what you're reading here, schmutz) and give the basic gist of whatever I might've devoted some paragraphs to before. In the case of news, which is honestly the only thing I really ever truly blogged about in a consistent way, I usually tweet a link and a brief comment. Tumblr, which I sometimes used quite a bit, was essentially a blogging service, even if it's used for a ton of non-writing-related things now.

So, WTF is a blog? I guess it's whatever you make it. This was a conclusion it took me a long time to reach. I started blogging in 2000 and developed a very clear set of ideas about what it was, what you did, and how you did it. All that shit has changed in 15 years but some of it is still valid and good practice and I still do it.

Using what's now called an "old" blogging platform like this one seems somehow quaint now. A singular practice akin to amateur taxidermy or artisanal composting. Yet I follow some people on Twitter who still regularly update their blogspot presence. They're around my age and I don't always like how they do it, but I have really grown to admire their constancy. My wife has a couple of Wordpress self-hosted blogs she's maintained for years now. She may go weeks without new posts, but she's kept the URL alive and always gone back... and I find that almost moving.

I've been terribly inconstant with blogs, ever since 2009 or so. It's a joke in my house, something my wife teases me about. There are a ton of reasons, of course, the most general reason being that I have severe ADHD and it affects my life in a pretty global way, including my writing--personal (like this) and professional; I've lost gigs as a writer or even turned them down because my ADHD is untreated right now.

But I have also struggled entirely too much in my head with what writing is. I think I'm writing this in great part because I want to stop that. And I'm addressing that dumb, inconsequential (for a vast number of people) question as to what a blog is because I concluded there was a reason I never borked this blog address, even though I've used it fitfully to not at all--I liked the fact it was here and I had it, if I needed it. Didn't think I'd need it. And actually, "need" is a bad word for a pursuit like this anyway. I just didn't think I had any use for the space.

Lately, though, I've begun to feel I may.

So there may be more posts to come. And if so, I'll do it for the practice. To get words in front of people, even if the number of people is small. I'll also do it for the constancy. I grew up in a stable home in a somewhat stable environment, went to school with the same people from kindergarten to, in some cases, college. Once I got older, constancy like that began to scare me. Messages I received from my father, who was never happy about much, made steadiness and sticking with places, situations, even with people sometimes,  feel like failure.

Middle age has a funny way of flipping ideas like that on their heads.

Blogger has been around for some time and I know how to use it. Google is a weird entity and may blow up Blogger tomorrow, but I'd be surprised if they did, so chances are it will be around for a while. Blogger has been pretty constant. It seems to fit well with what I'm rambling on about here.

Watch this space. The next post may actually be shorter, and make sense. And it may even be consistent.

I may..

...start writing shit here again. Or perhaps the only content of this blog for the foreseeable future will be threats , hints, and intimations that I might do that. We shall see. Or not.

Huh

I'm not entirely sure why I opened this blog back up again. It's not like I've used it in a while. It's also not the most elegant interface... but that sort of shit is overrated and people natter on about it far too much. I sure have, in the past.

I've had trouble with seeing the point in what I do. This thing that became my career, whatever it is, around 7-8 years ago now. What's there to write about? Fiction is one thing. I have fiction ideas and I do write them out--sometimes completely. But I adamantly refuse to go whole hog and just publish fiction online, especially since the only writing I've ever been paid for is basically news writing.

What I'm considering is using this space to mostly talk about the usual blog stuff. Nothing explicitly personal; that bores me. But what I'm into now.

Hell, that seems so obvious I shouldn't even have to say it.

Anyway. Check back and see if I've bothered.

You're welcome (for the photo of my cat).

My Horrible Basement

I had to go to the basement today.

We live in a 100-year-old house. It is in decent shape overall, but the basement is horrible. Half the area looks just as I am sure it did when the house was built: fucking creepy.

The other half has clearly been used by previous owners and renters, but not for a decade at least. And all of it is awful. It is dark. Insulation hangs down, ripped from where it was stapled under the floorboards. An old carpet covers the clay floor. Remarkably, it isn't moldy. It does, however, exist in a permanent state of squishiness. "Squishiness" is a cute word for a terrible state.

I went down there to store some things we don't use but can't easily throw out. Once in the basement I realized the duct that feeds the main A/C vent needed to be re-attached. I got some tape--I actually use duct tape on ducts, sometimes--and a flashlight.

I climbed up on an old folding chair to secure the duct to the vent.

In that moment I was sure every crawling thing in the basement was skittering down my bare neck. I imagined hundreds of baby black widows on my shoulders, looking for their biting spots. In my mind, vicious, mutant rats who emigrated from Chernobyl were preparing to shred my ankles.

And then. And. Then.

I was done.

I scrambled down from the folding chair, sweeping imagined crawling things from my legs, neck and shoulders.

As I stumbled across the stone seen in the photo above, which lays just inside the basement entrance, I realized some previous tenant had most likely laid it there as a warning.

A Walk

I went for a walk in the woods. I jogged the first quarter-mile or so. My age and weight told on me. I grew tired but was determined to finish the walk. Since I was listening to music on my phone and tired I somehow lost track of where I was.

The trails where I walked are well-marked but I was still confused. I was looking at a suburban roadway through the trees and had never seen that from the trail before. Above the still nude trees it grew cloudy. The wind grew cold.

For a moment I felt very old. I am only 43, but I imagined myself 40 years older. Imagined myself 83 and alone and confused in the cold woods.

Then I thought, keep walking, dumbass, and get over it. And I did.

When I was done I paused and took this photo by the rushing, cold, brown river. I was thinking of the NO OUTLET sign by my house, where I usually make jokey self-portraits. Thinking, illogically, fuck you, pal.

And Another Thing...

Long-time readers (I have at least two, maybe) as well as my wife have reminded me more than once of how often I begin and then quit blogs. Here's the thing about that--I don't mean this in a combative way, but I don't really care. They're a comparatively (to the rest of the Internet) modest bunch of bytes on random servers here and there. Much of that blog writing also wasn't worth saving. I've been pretty good about saving my own copies of writing that really mattered to me--the other stuff could just sit.

I do think I've gotten to a place where I finally like having a stable presence online (my Twitter account, for instance, has had the same name and been online for over 2 years). If it's my own blog, however, I'm not going to feel tasked to update every single day and I'm not gonna go nuts worrying about traffic.

This is the part where I should wrap this up in a pithy bow but this is the time of night when my brain completely fritzes out. Y'all go play or beat up mimes or whatever it is you kids do these days, with your smartphones, vajazzlers and random, horrific violence.

Purposeful Purposelessness

Ali Smiles/Flickr

I was fretting about what to do with this blog and then, like a bolt from the blue, it came to me: you will write whatever you want.

I sat stunned for a moment after this revelation, contemplatively picking my nose. What, I wondered, did that voice mean?

It repeated, you will write whatever you want, dumbass.

Having no luck with my nose, I pulled my dainty pickin' finger out and said to it, "Seriously?"

My finger, still recovering from the horrorshow that truly is the inside of my nose (left nostril in particular), said nothing. It simply shook and wept as silent tears coursed down the smudged, sad little face I'd drawn on it in fine-point Sharpie (which also gave me the most miniscule of buzzes as my finger roamed about in my nose). I left it to its misery and drank a Pepsi.

Write whatever you want, dumbass.


Like, in a blog.

Revolutionary.

Here's the thing, though. I certainly do write personal, even emotional stuff. I seem to save that for Tumblr, if I do it at all, because Tumblr is a nice community and it feels almost like some of those folks who read my blog and vice-versa are pals who may actually give a shit, as opposed to the rest of the Internet, which is mostly just the sock puppets of one or two computer-savvy sex offender party clowns living in dank basements somewhere in the Midwest.

In general, though, I like to write about other stuff, or fiction (or I like to make jokes). Sometimes people even pay me for that writing. So I think the deal here is I won't be writing fiction, because that's one kind of writing I do that I've never been asked to do or paid to do and I'd like to get paid for that one day, so I don't want to give it away for free. I won't put much personal stuff, though never say never. I'm an emotionally unstable mess of a man, so that shit is total wild card territory. I'll save simple one-liners or two or three liners for Tumblr and/or Twitter. Here I'll be exploring dumbass, acid-flashback-inspired tangents from the depths of what's left of my brain, how-tos about everything (I'm fucking into how-tos these days, even though I never do anything), weird news, weird people... really, whatever. I don't think there'll be a common denominator. This certainly won't be a GOT-DAMN crime blog (though I actually have a new blog set aside for crime-related stuff I can't sell to an editor), but I'm not ruling that out, either.

Hopefully anyone who happens by will be marginally entertained before they really start to wonder what the hell is wrong with me and get scared. Most importantly, I'll be entertained.

It's a great, freeing philosophy, this "Blog whatever the fuck you want" thing. I wish I'd thought to do it sooner. But seriously, there's something wrong with me, so I didn't.

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.

I want to update this blog more often...

It's hard to break myself of the quick-posting Tumblr habit, though. Not the quick-post element, actually, so much as the Tumblr community. Blogger has made strides in that direction and I'm pleased that I have 4 followers now, but the Tumblr dashboard setup is so convenient and user-friendly--and honestly, intimate in a conversational way--it's hard to turn your head around as a blogger and move away from that.

The other option is to have both blogs but I'm not sure I'm all that interesting. I get ideas that seem like they'd be a better fit for posting here, but then I think they'd also be a better fit for magazine X, weekly newspaper Y or a site like The Daily Beast so I then feel obligated to go and try and sell whatever that idea might be.

I'm keeping it for now, though, and have two big posts about stuff in draft that I'll complete this week and just see where it goes from there.

Phone blogging because it's Thursday

I mean, if you really need a reason.

The image has nothing to do with the post save that my son drew it in MS Paint and I think that's pretty cool. I partly wanted to see how well this app handled inserting images.

The idea of blogging from your phone has always intrigued me & I'm going to start experimenting more with that here. This isn't new by any stretch but it us new to me, to some degree.

I mean I've frequently used my phone to post to Posterous and Tumblr, but those are both more straightforward and at the same time a little limiting. I want to see how feasible it is to do it with this program.

Other than that I got nothing right now.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone