The Infinite Bloginess
I sat at the kitchen table, locked in a silent, existential staring contest with a blinking cursor. The cursor was winning, mostly because it lacked eyelids, a central nervous system, or any capacity for self-doubt. Outside, the rain was battering the windowpane with the kind of grim, relentless enthusiasm usually reserved for tax collectors. It was June, a month which had clearly forgotten its own job description and decided to pretend it was November.
I am not, by any sensible stretch of the imagination, the sort of person who should own a blog. My mind does not so much think as bounce erratically around the inside of my skull like a hyperactive spaniel that has accidentally ingested a double espresso. It refuses to settle on a platform, a topic, or indeed any single train of thought for longer than it takes a subatomic particle to decay.
Over the last six months, I have constructed, populated, demolished, and entirely vaporised various iterations of my website with the casual disregard of a minor deity who keeps getting bored of his own physics engines. It sounds entirely unhinged. It is. And yet, I persist. Why? The universe has yet to provide a satisfactory answer, and frankly, I’m not sure I’d understand the mathematics if it did.
Just as I stood poised to pull the plug on the whole endeavour—to permanently consign this digital real estate to the great recycling bin in the sky—a terrifying realisation struck me. Stopping would be infinitely worse. If I didn't have this outlet, the thoughts would simply back up. I would inevitably find myself wandering onto one of those vast, howling wildernesses of modern social media, screaming into a corporate-owned void alongside millions of other people who are also screaming into the void, usually about the temperature of their soup or the political opinions of strangers.
I needed my own private void. A bespoke, artisanal void. So, naturally, I did the only logical thing a human being in possession of a malfunctioning brain could do: I looked for somewhere to land my blog.
It is a curious fact that attempting to build a blog is one of the few known methods of bringing some semblance of order to the howling chaos of the human psyche. This may sound like a wild exaggeration, but I assure you, the alternative is letting the thoughts run wild, which usually ends with me trying to explain to a bewildered dog why the concept of Tuesday is fundamentally flawed.
Writing is the safety valve. I suspect I have a deep, biological compulsion to do it, in much the same way that migratory birds have a compulsion to fly south, though with significantly less coordination and a much higher consumption of tea.
Someone once remarked, with a degree of accuracy that is frankly uncomfortable, that blogging is merely graffiti with punctuation. If that is indeed the case, then this tiny corner of the internet is my brick wall. I look back at the screen. Outside, the rain continues its aggressive negotiation with the glass, but inside, these words are safe, suspended in a warm glow of silicon and hope.
The question remains, of course: have you got a wall of your own, or are you still looking for a suitable piece of chalk?