Waking up at the wheel

Sorry it's been so silent around here, folks. It's just that up until now it's been so cold. I go outside for a smoke and by the time I come back my fingers are all frozen. Easy solution: stop smoking, right? Well lest the American Cancer Society join the long list of public institutions lobbying to get this blog permanently shut down, let me just add that I do not endorse smoking. It's just that a cig here and there with a glass of Broadbent 5-year Malmsey (only 20 bucks at Gomers) can be rejuvenating on a cold, late night.

Another thing is that I was re-reading the Bacchae (please hold your knock-knock jokes about Euripides until the end of the performance) and I couldn't help but notice Teiresias's chastisement of impudent young Pentheus:

But you are glib; your phrases come rolling out
smoothly on the tongue, as though your words were wise
instead of foolish. The man whose glibness flows
from his conceit of speech declares the thing he is:
a worthless and stupid citizen.

Before you think I'm just beating up on myself here, I'm talking about the collective droning and blather of the online masses to which we all contribute in one form or another almost daily. So many words, so little substance. Maybe that's another reason I still enjoy newspapers. They're tangible. You can draw faces on the text and photos when they piss you off.

With blogging, it's tough to find the right middle ground between being uncomfortably forthcoming and totally guarded. Personal blogs are like newspapers about one person, which is why I love them and also why I loathe them. No sooner have I shaken my fist at someone else's site for being sloppy or uninteresting than I go back to my own computer/flight console and write about what I'm having for dinner (braised clams in parsley broth, AGAIN) or something I overheard at the grocery store ("Sir, please stop assaulting the other customers with our delicious biscotti samples").

Plenty of times in the past few years I've thought I should apply my writing energies elsewhere. Newspapers (still) are more reputable, magazines are more attractive, and hand-written scrolls of poetry do more to impress the woolgathering housewives in my sonnet-writing workshop. But when it comes to free, instantaneous, and easy-to-distribute publishing, blogging can't be beat.

I've read that blogs are going out of fashion and giving way to more micro-bloggy, networky things like Twitter and Facebook, but I think that just makes me like blogs even more. I used to lament that the word "blog" sounded awful, like a booger, fecal log or a case of the pukes, but compared to "twitter tweets," the word "blog" contains a venerable ugliness that I feel comfortable with. The blogosphere is like the neighborhood bar where everyone gets sloppy and runs their mouths even though nobody remembers anything the next day. Probably healthier to avoid, but staying home isn't any fun either.

So I plan to keep blogging, even if this first post in a while is nothing but a blog post about how I plan to keep blogging. In the coming weeks you'll be seeing a lot of the same stuff I've always posted here, including shaggy-dog stories, transcriptions of fever dreams, fake headlines, mini-travelogues, photo adventures, haiku, music and food links, and perhaps even some more original art.

One thing I'll probably try to do is decouple this blog from any specific sense of place. I know that maintaining an illusion is a writer's primary task, but trying to present Kansas City as a perennially exciting place to spend your twenties is more than even I can bear. After living in KCMO for over three years, I find myself cycling through the same tired observations and storylines. Somebody gets shot. Another favorite cafe, venue or guitar store closes down. The tax guy dressed up as the statue of liberty puts down his signs and sits down at the intersection for a cigarette. The beat goes on.

I'm sure I'll still mention local happenings and will continue to place-drop as much as possible, but from now on I'm going to make very little effort to be factual, relevant, hip, grammatically correct or in any way tied to reality. If you're going to blog, you might as well take advantage of the fact that there are no rules and nobody cares.

On that note, feel free to chime in if you have any suggestions for content you'd like to see more of. And have a good day.

Thanks for reading and come back soon.

LDHW