On Blogging

It feels funny, to say “I have a blog” or “I’m blogging.” I’m not sure why. Is it because it’s such an ugly word? It sounds a bit more downscale than “I’m writing” or “I’m journaling.” On the other hand, it carries much less cultural baggage than either of those terms. It has kind of a macho, dumb swagger to it.

I first heard the term in regards to Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton. Their rendezvous was first revealed in the aptly named Drudge Report, an online blog. At the time, commentators carefully informed their listeners that a blog was a combination of “web” and “log” and was a type of online journal. I didn’t pay much attention; my computer skills at the time were sparse.

Much later, and somewhat more computer literate (or at least able to Google), I came across Callahan’s Cleveland, Brewed Fresh Daily, and our own Tremonter. Curious, I eventually decided to try a blog myself.

Fascinatingly, and perhaps, appallingly, people find it. “Hey, I read your blog!” someone will yell to me across a bar or a counter. At times it’s someone I don’t know. On one occasion, a posting about what I perceived as city inaction got a call from a department head. “There’s this ‘blog,’” he said, as if he was saying something useful but slightly disreputable, like ‘underwear.’ Which I suppose blogging is.

People have lost jobs over blogs - famously, a Washington intern who posted online accounts of her sexual exploits. I won’t do that here.

Mostly, I am writing about issues of community development, but this also secretly lets me be something I have always secretly wanted to be – a writer.

I come from a family of writers. My mother, an English major, wrote her own children’s poems. My favorite is:

“There once was a wise old wizard,
Who raised his wand for a blizzard.
It galed and it blowed, it hailed and it snowed;
And he froze – nose, toes and gizzard.”

Later, in the midst of the stresses of raising three kids in a somewhat dysfunctional family (whose isn’t), my mother would cover reams of yellow legal pads with confessional discourse – mostly diatribes about car-pooling and other drudgeries of family life (I peeked). Eventually she channeled this energy into divorce and then law school. My sister responded by locking herself in her room and writing poetry. She currenlty teaches creative writing, and is a published poet. My brother, the youngest, also became a writer, publishing a book of war reportage to much acclaim (“Generation Kill”). My father will write an essay about George Bernard Shaw at the drop of a hat, and send it on to everyone who might possibly read it.

Alone among my family, I was the non-writer.

Oh, I mean, I wrote, but not for an audience. Or even, much, for myself. My only contribution to a journal had been a sentence fragment that my mother forced me to write when caught in the act of egging a rival’s house (I was twelve, and it was my friend’s idea, I swear). “Last night, Robbie and me…” was as far as I got.

I have always felt self-conscious about writing – it felt pompous to try to write anything beyond a letter or text for a newsletter. I mean, who cares what I think?

But using email loosened me up. I started to use it for work and for personal communication, and writing began to feel more natural.

But a blog is something else. It is public.

With all the concerns about privacy today, perhaps someday I will have reason to regret something I have written. I hope not. What I am writing about is my personal reaction to events in my community, in which I live and work. My main concerns are local, my street and neighborhood, my family and the city we live in.

There are people who think the online communities that arise from blogging and sites like My Space will transform society. Perhaps the social networks that arise will make us better citizens, but who knows. At any rate, it's certainly different from when I was a kid and everyone was fretting that "no one writes anymore." Plenty of people are writing now.

My only fear is this: somewhere deep in a bunker in an undisclosed location, Dick Cheney will come across my blog, and with a shotgun atop his jittering knees, the word “Li-Ber-Al” will form on lips. And like the hapless, wingless quail placed in his path for the thrill of destruction, I fear I will make an easy target. But at least I've had my say.