A Web Log—Er, Blog: What a Terrible Idea

You’ve probably been wondering what I’ve been doing the last few months. Sorry, I typed that wrong. You have given absolutely zero thought as to what I’ve been doing the last few months. Well, I’ve been working on something. And here it is! A blog. Also, the implication is misleading, and I apologize again. It took me the better part of an hour, not three months, to set this blog up, so I’ve been doing a lot of the same things I’ve always been doing, minus an hour, minus registration and domain fees for this site, and a stressful, anxious click that took 45 seconds before I hit publish on my first article. Other than that, life is moving right along, with its hiccups and habits, good and bad. More on that later.

A blog (a blog?), in the age when our attention spans are the size of my newborn baby’s pinky toe, which is to say, very small indeed, but paired with the hope that if you come back to me and read a little of what I say, maybe, like my son’s pinky toe, your attention span will grow larger over time. At least large enough to put up with a few paragraphs of mine.

What even is a blog? Though he wasn’t the first to do the act of “blogging” as we think of it today, a man named Peter Merholz, according to Wikipedia is credited with creating the word, when, in his “web log” he would use to track his thoughts, he separated the words after the second letter instead, to say “we blog,” and it stuck. In any event, I started a web log, or a we blog, or just a blog, and you are here.

I intend to use this blog as a platform to wax poetic about the things I see as an attorney, as a dad, a husband, my faults and my struggles. To follow my curiosity and perhaps, in an off-label-but-still-FDA-blessed fashion, have a positive side-effect on the reader.

I intend to write in this every day, or at least every weekday, and publish—ahh publish. Frightening!—a page or two at a commensurate rate. Seth Godin calls this act of putting your writing out there, the publishing part, as “shipping,” by which he means to hit send, to ship the damn thing, to send something off into the world, to let it go, create a little art, and give it away, in hopes it will stir something in someone else.

If it never shipped, was it ever created? If it never shipped, it never had the chance to change somebody, even if just a little bit, which, as Seth says, is the essence of art: art is a gift, it should be shared. While I do hope you get something out of this blog, what will sustain me, selfishly speaking, is that I will show up to the page as much as possible, write down what I believe useful and helpful in my mind, and, if hardly anyone reads it, it will at least give me the opportunity to build the writing muscle in me that I’ve always wanted to build. And to get over the fear of writing with honesty.

Writing and reading have their own muscles, and if not worked, just like my flabby inner thighs without my daily dosage of side-lunges, the muscle atrophies. I put the trophy in atrophy. Well, no more! Write on I must. See you tomorrow.