To Blog or not to Blog

Why I do I press on here? Hearing Lileks question himself made me do the same. He has commenters, evidence of readership, a following. At the very least he’d be letting people down if he stopped blogging. People like me. I’ve been following Lileks on and off for years because…well, lots of reasons, not the least of which is he is maybe the only blogger who has ever caused my morning coffee to come suddenly shooting out of my nose. And the entertainment is free. His blog is always just a click away. No logging in. No pesky passwords. No repeated links to the PayPal donate button (if he even has one). But the biggest reason is the content. I admit to a fondness for a crafty story wrapped around the most quotidian things, the otherwise banal day-to-day things found in the backwash of our lives. But Lileks pays attention. For Lileks, it’s not just a box of cereal on the grocery store shelf; inside his prose the box and its colorful advert becomes a kind of cultural signpost. He doesn’t merely let his dog out in the back yard. There’s something important in the yard; something otherwise disregarded as mundane or pointless becomes worthy of our focus, occasionally via the dog’s point of view. Cataracts and all. It usually takes pages of good fiction to trigger my empathy; Lileks can pull it off in a single post.

Not everything he writes do I find entertaining or even interesting, but that’s not the height of my bar. Consistently good is good enough. The perfect can go pound salt.

Which brings me back to why I blog. For family and friends mostly. Living in Alaska we don’t get down to America too often and the blog is a way to stay in touch. And meager though it may be, I do have some readers. Not judging from the number of comments, but according to my site meter I do have visitors, some days a dozen or more, other days less, a few days many more. Could be web spiders or bots I suppose, can’t rule that out. Anyway, blogging is great way to think out loud, a way to link to things I find entertaining, scholarly, or neither. And it keeps me writing. So there’s something in it for me too.