Into the Fray

"Because everyone else is doing it" is not always the best reason to get into something. Such logic has driven millions to corrupt their bodies with tobacco, alcohol, pot, crack, Botox, "the clear" and the macarena.

And yet here I am, dipping a timid toe into the murky waters of the Black Blogoon, daring to stir up whatever deformed, disfigured creatures lie beneath the surface (like this sentence, for instance).

Of course, I'm not really doing this out of peer pressure--God knows it'll take a hell of a lot more than a blog to make this author cool. I'm doing it more out of covetousness--hell, pure envy. Just as everyone and their second cousin in Los Angeles is writing a screenplay, everyone and their stepmother-in-law's dry cleaner who has an email account also seems to have a blog--so why not me? Why shouldn't I get to exhale the bitter fumes of my 21st century angst via my keyboard and DSL connection? Who says I can't mount my own virtual soapbox and hurl vitriolic verbal lances at the windmills of my choice! I have opinions, too, dammit, and one of them is that I should be airing my opinions--all of them--the brilliant ones and the stupid ones--to the wide wide world of Web!

And so, I conclude this entry by paraphrasing no less monumental a figure than Charles Foster Kane: "I think it would be fun to run a blog." Besides which, it's free, so I don't have to sacrifice a colossal media empire and my soul to do it.

Or, in the parlance of that other uniquely 21st-century mode of communication, the text message: WTF.