Resistance was Futile...

Okay.

Fuck it.

I'm starting a blog.

Again.

I only say again since I had a blog. Once. Way back when. Some time back in 2002. Maybe early 2003. That's when I was starting to get back into photography and messed around with Dreamweaver in order to create a site that would display my photos online. That photography site included a blog where I could throw up random thoughts, rants, the occasional amusing anecdote and maybe even some ever-so-rare eloquent insight. But it was mostly random thoughts. The most eloquent thing I remember writing wasn't particularly insightful; I remember it being a sincere, whole-hearted defense of the music of the Bee Gees.

But maintaining ones own website like that is a lot of work. Eventually, the amount of work outweighed the rewards. I eventually found photo.net, and started using that to upload photos. The original site died through neglect.

Fast forward six years and I now use Flickr to display my photos. I never went back to a blog.

Now, for the past six months or so, I've been finding my head becoming increasingly jumbled with thoughts wanting to get out -- thoughts that weren't directed at any particular person, but just to people in general. I live alone. I'm single. I have great friends, but nobody who'd want to burden with every random thought.

Still, I was resisting the whole blog thing. It just all seemed so egotistical to me. What could possibly make me think that people would be interested in reading what I had to say? Or what I was thinking. Then I realised that, at one point, I never thought that people would want to look at my crappy photos. And now people are buying them. Or just plain stealing them. Maybe my thoughts would hold the same appeal.

I also was wary about putting my thoughts out there in "public". However, that was just my overly-paranoid, private side talking. For years, I revelled in the fact that typing my name into Google got you nothing but listings for a town in Missouri. These days, you still get a whole bunch of listings for Missouri, but now the top listings link to my photo pages. So I'm already "out" there.

But photos are one thing. Writing is another. Eventually, I convinced myself that that was more irrationality talking. I wasn't planning on writing anything here that I wouldn't express openly around other people. If I was going to offend someone with my writing, I was going to offend them anyway. And, really, I'm not that offensive. Was I afraid of people finding out the full extent of my neuroticism and dorkiness? I don't hide that in real life either. So there went those arguments out the window. I'm comfortable with the thought that people might be laughing at me rather than with me.

The surrender to the blog came in increments. First, it was the using of Facebook's status updates to project myself. However, I found that I'd hit up against that 160-character limit and truncating or simplifying thoughts far too much. And a good rant is just impossible to fit into 160 characters. Then, I found myself increasingly adding thoughts and anecdotes to certain photos I was uploading to Flickr. But that could only be done if it had relevance to the photo at the time.

I suppose I could have tried to combine my photography and ranting into some sort of melange of artistic expression. Like yesterday, perhaps:

Let me just start off by saying this: I am not a person that gets overly bitter on Valentine's Day, despite being single, and perhaps overly-cynical about my prospects. I just choose to ignore it -- as much as one can possibly ignore this media-saturating, manufactured, saccharine-excuse for a Hallmark holiday. Okay, maybe that sounded a little bitter, but rest assured I've always held a special disdain towards Valentine's Day, even while I was in the middle of birds-chirping-, sun-shining-, everything-is-rainbows-and-kittens-type relationships.

I was doing a good job of ignoring it yesterday. Even when I wasn't ignoring it, by partaking in the multitudes of pro-offered cookies and sweets that morning, I wasn't expressing any particular malice. I wasn't expressing any malice, that is, until the third person came into my office to complain that I had called for a 4:00-5:00pm meeting that afternoon. You see, despite the fact that I had scheduled this meeting during regular office hours (and had checked that everyone's Outlook Schedule was clear), I'd now taken away the option that these people had, should they, maybe, possibly, want to want to leave work early to be extra sure they'd make it to their Valentine's Day plans.

I suppose I could have gone home yesterday and taken a picture of my naked ass and posted it on Flickr. Then I could have typed up my thoughts and stuck it in the photo caption. The photo and the rant would have gone together perfectly. You see, when the first two people complained I was merely somewhat annoyed. But I explained, in the most accommodating way I knew, that I couldn't possibly reschedule since that was the only time everyone had free, and that this meeting couldn't be pushed to the following week. By the time the third person had finished his complaint, I was frustrated enough just to tell him just to "Kiss my ass."

Okay, maybe the Flickr thing wouldn't have been the best of ideas.

Firstly, that would have gotten my Flickr photostream flagged as non-family-safe. Secondly, coming up with good photographic accompaniments to my rants would take way too much time and effort. Time, especially, blunts the vitriol. Either I just don't go quite as nuts in the write-up, or I just don't bother posting. Even I realise that the vitriol is what people find amusing. By the time I had gotten home, set up the camera and tripod, worked out the lighting and angles, made sure that there wasn't anything too unsightly on my large behind that I couldn't Photoshop out later, and taken the perfect pic, I would have calmed down. And calm just isn't funny. If I'm going to blog, I have to be entertaining. Not just for all of you out there, but also to minimise the amount of time, while reading back on past entries, I ask myself why I'd written such drivel in the first place.

So it comes back to the blog: Somewhere that I could write down anything I wanted, when I felt like it, and at a length that would satisfy the written diarrhea / stream-of-consciousness thing I've got going on.

I've started a blog. Yet I can't help but feel a little dirty about it.

God help me. Flying Spaghetti Monster help us all.