Why I started this site
Plus a personal goal for it
I took a stab at an actual mission statement, but it almost feels too carefully measured. It’s kind of like, I wrote this long story about what I want this site to embody, but it’s like a character I created, like building a new warrior or cleric in D&D. There’s a personality which can appear more or less real, imbued with greater or lesser amounts of effort, but ultimately isn’t actually present.
I’d like to write more, is all. It’s nice to have something to do on the computer that isn’t repeatedly refreshing Twitter or visiting the same subreddits multiple times a day.
Part of me wants to keep all of these entries dashed off, so that I can just sit down, scrawl something into a text file, and publish it. Wham bam, another post is complete, and I can go to sleep happy with the knowledge that I’ve created something that day. Does the post have merit? Well, it exists… so doesn’t that lend it some inherent value? The mere fact of its existence, I mean.
I could try to write longer things, essays and articles and such, and then edit them and refine their language and make them into things that other people might actually want to read. The fear there is that I would do so, and then 10 years from now I’d realize that the effort was for nought. That I’d spent a decade firing off epistles into the abyss, and that the sum total of that effort was pages and pages of words that lay undiscovered by anyone else.
Maybe the above page just speaks to my desire to write in a more articulated way. There’s part of me that wants to be very casual about this, in the hopes that a low-expectations approach helps me to keep going. And there’s a part of me that wants to be discovered, somehow, and thinks that by writing casually about my life as a thirty-something man in early 2020s America some opportunity will appear from nothing. Maybe this is some kind of weird heirloom I can pass down to future descendants. Hey, at least it won’t be hard to read the handwriting on this thing, right?
In any case, my goal is to post at least once a day. If I can sustain that pace for even a month, it’ll outdo any attempts at journaling I’ve ever made. And over time, my standards may creep up to where I’m only publishing actual interesting things I’ve written (or drawn, or photographed, or composed, etc) and not just the ephemera that I’ve captured drifting through my brain.
Image: A member of the Glyptodon genus of megafauna. I wish I had armor like this bad boy. Apparently these guys, essentially large armadillos, were the size of Volkswagen Beetles.