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A Bloggers Tale

Q: How did I start blogging, and what has it meant to me?

Once upon a time, I had a series of news sites that I checked daily. One of the sites I read every day was opinionjournal.com. One day, James Taranto posted a piece by someone named "Jane Galt". She was writing ( I dont think it was even called blogging then, was it?) about her experience working in the World Trade Center. I found it moving, touching and everything I had ever wanted on the site reported in the way I learned to expect from men like Ernie Pyle and John Steinbeck. It was writing about people, by people, at the time it happened, not from J-school know-it-alls who never left the hotel lobby and only wanted to tell me what they thought I should know. It changed everything about how I thought about "what to read".

I went back to her site daily, reading and sometimes crying and laughing about what she was experiencing in her time at the site of the massacre. One day, I noticed a set of websites that she had listed on the side of her site. I started clicking and reading what she read.

From that list of websites, I found Steven Den Beste. From there I found Vodkapundit. With just those three sites I had found better content and more consistently good writing than what could be found in any 50 newspapers on any given day. Then one day I left a comment, and I got a response from one of the other readers. Now, I wasnt just reading a website, I was participating in the discussion. Then one day I sent an email to Steven Den Beste. I was one of those "just suppose" emails, so the result was predictable.

He slaughtered me.

He didnt just do it in a response to me, he posted the whole thing on his site. On one hand, I was embarrassed, on the other hand he did it in such a way as to point out to me, that had I spent a little more time thinking and a little less time sprattling around, I might have had a good idea. It was a lesson I would not forget.

Then I found Rantburg. Rantburg was the first site that I ever made a post on. Rantburg is not technically a "blog", but it is one hell of an interesting site. Fred has something else going on there that cannot really be described. I call it open source news reporting.

Then one day I wrote something in a comment on vodkapundit and it started a firestorm of response. I felt so bad that I had accidentally trashed his post that I wrote Steve an email in apology. I told him I would voluntarily stay away from the site for awhile as I was clearly disruptive,even though that was never my intent. He wrote back saying that not only was it fine, but that I should get my own blog.

"My own blog?, Wha?".

At the same time, several others in the vodkapundit commentariat told me the same thing ( ed driscoll, triticale were the ones that I remember the most, or at least they were the most insistent).

So, now I was no longer a reader of other peoples stuff. I was a "commentor", and as it turns out, my comments were pretty good. This is what "The Blog-o-sphere" had doth done to me.

I, who never ever got above a "D" in English, a sufferer of what today would be called a "learning disability", had written some things that other people found a)interesting b)thoughtful.

This was not something I was prepared to believe as even remotely possible.

However, the boys were insistant, and one day, I went and got myself a blog. I started small, using the "90 days free" typepad service just to see if its something that would work or not.

I remember trying to decide what it was I was going to write about. I didnt want to be a "linker" and I didnt want to be "all politics all the time". In the end, I decided not to think about it too much and not to worry about it, just write what popped into my head at the time.

My wife found a picture of my deceased mother-in-law, and I wrote about what I saw in the picture. I found that writing that post changed me in some way. I wrote about what life was like on Roseton Ave and how it hurt me to leave it. I wrote about my bike being stolen and the end of a bully. It was all much cheaper, more satisfying and more effective than group therapy.

One night I saw John Kerry on 'Teevee' (just one too many times for my tastes), yammering on with the 'boston foghorn' voice about Vietnam and I just snapped and began to tap the keyboard like a minature game of whack-a-mole and out came this post. Then I went to bed.

I logged on the next day and found I was the recipient of something I had never heard of before. It was an "insta-lanche". I was horrified, the piece was barely edited, and not really coherent, and now it seemed the world had been reading it. I had 200 emails, but the end of the day over 1,000. Up till that point, I dont think I had ever had a single comment or trackback, now I had hundreds of people writing me. Most of them were laughing right along side with me, but there were a large number of people who wanted me hung by my thumbs. "How could I say that about John Kerry, obviously he was going to win..."

Now I really knew I could write. When you can piss people off, thats how you know you got something under the hood.

Glenn Reynolds, another man I have never met, has also touched my life and in simple yet odd way, has changed it. I hope to meet him someday, but until them, I will simply say "thank you". All of us who blog, readers or writers, owe Glenn a debt of thanks for popularizing our sport and helping us all perfect our craft. He may be a law professor, but he's had a big hand in the renaissance of writing that is occuring in the modern world.

Learning that I could irritate people to the point that they felt compelled to send me hate mail was interesting and in someways fun, but there were other things too. Once, I got an email from someone who was very deeply touched by something I wrote on election eve. That email still makes me cry. I cannot accept that anything I have ever written has managed to make it into anyone elses life, but apparently, it has.

I cannot express in words,written or spoken, how touched I have been that some of the things I have written has been so well received by people in the blogosphere. Frankly, I still find it stunning that anyone except a few people I know have ever even found the site, much less enjoyed anything I have ever written.

For those of you that have enjoyed what I have written, all I can say is that I have enjoyed every minute of writing it. It has truly been "my pleasure". Writing a blog has changed me in ways I could never have thought possible and you've all had a part in that, and I thank you for it.

For those of you who are angry or upset at something I've written, I will tell you what someone once told me: "Go get you own blog".

We all talk about how the world is changing because of blogs. It is, but its also changing me. I look at myself differently now that I've taken to writing, I think about things differently. I spell better, I take more time with what I want to say. Blogging has in effect made me a better person.

This all started because I saw something that Megan Mcardle wrote one day in 2002. She doesnt know me, but she changed me. Steven Den Beste told me to "take a little more time and think it all the way out next time". I never met Steve, but he changed me. Stephen Green said " Get your own blog and I'll link the hell out of you",and it changed me.

Glenn Reynolds said "heh" and my life has never been the same.

Blogging. The best way to drain your emotions since the invention of the medicinal leech.

Posted @ March 03, 2005 12:29 AM | Current Affairs

Posted by: slarrow at March 3, 2005 06:57 AM

Posted by: bothenook at March 3, 2005 10:30 AM