A Self-Reflexive First Post

It's been a bit overwhelming these past few days -- hours reading blogs, blogging tips, blogging how to's, and watching an unending marathon of "24" (unrelated to blogging). It was enough to get me to set up one of these guys myself. I sense that I have actually taken it all in, digested the thick stew of the blogosphere, and if I have (most likely not the case) then it sits more like a 2 AM hotdog after a night out at the bars -- I awake to a distinct aftertaste, but no memory of the actual ingestion.

Prior to my blogtism, I viewed the whole enterprise from a safe and admittedly condescending perch, seeing the whole blogosphere as some geeky cousin to reality television, an exercise in self-explotation whose members acted out their personal demons as they hurled venom at one another from behind their keyboards, in their stained undershirts. It seemed a pseudo-reality, populated by pseudonymns -- something to be experienced by a Don DeLillo character, not by me.

Much of this perspective most likely stemmed from my early days on the internet, goofing around on AOL chat rooms with my 8th grade buddies, baiting the members of "fatvampires3" or posturing as a gerbal fanatic on "rodentpetlvrs." The other members of these chat rooms formed together in my mind as a massive cultural underbelly, fetid and festering for years until the world wide web allowed it to surface in all its inglory. Clearly this last description was not cooked by my 8th grade mind, so a closer approximation of how I once envisioned this subculture (though still a bit too metaphorical for a 14 year old) would be the figure of the gimp in "Pulp Fiction," shackled in some gun store basement, only to be let out by the internet, who I guess we'll call Zed in this metaphore. To be honest though, my parents wouldn't let me see Pulp Fiction until high school, so that probably wasn't accurate either.

But just as I was to find out years later, over the course of many hilarious nights of reminescing, that the chatrooms of my youth were most likely populated by a bunch of 8th grade kids, I have now discovered that this whole blogging deal isn't as subversive and alien to me as I had assumed. In fact, I'm hoping to fit right in.

So, come one, come all, sit back, pull up an ergonomic mouse and keyboard, and let's see if we can't think of some new, strange, and inspiring ways to make sense of this world that we're growing older with.