Post 500

This is my 500th post in slightly less than two years.

So let me take the opportunity to explain what blogging means to me.

First, it allows me to write—an activity I enjoy so long as I’m not doing it to specifications or for money.

It also allows me to write with a relatively low level of responsibility. In my blogs, I am not writing as a journalist, a scholar, a teacher, or an authority. As a blogger, my allegiance is only to the truth as I see it at this point in time, with minimal consideration of what others perceive to be fair, valuable, entertaining, or moral. My judgments here are not meant to be long-lasting. Unlike argument, which is mostly about logic—reasons and facts—a blog permits a more extemporaneous, thus disposable, essay towards what is true, important, lovely, and good.

In a way, what I’m doing here is writing personal letters to no particular person.

But unlike a diary or a journal, blogging permits at least the possibility of an audience—though I tend to think of readers of blogs as more eavesdroppers than a formal reading public.

Blogging allows a certain disregard for the audience that most other forms of public communication do not. In this respect, a blog lies somewhere between a journal entry and newspaper commentary. This disregard for the common reader is not entirely good for writing per se, because it encourages self-indulgence. It also gives the writer a blank check to be as offensive, mean, bigoted, ludicrous, sentimental, and moody as he or she feels at a particular moment, which may not accurately represent his or her more considered (and considerate) worldview or manners.

Blogs are always works in progress—and do not offer the final word on anything. And though the public often hungers for the final word, the open-endedness of blogs is one of their assets.

If you find this blog, I hope you enjoy it—or some parts of it, anyway. But by all means do your own feeling and thinking about the world for yourself—and always take what I write with a grain of salt—salt perhaps that can (I hope) enhance the flavor of your own responses to the events of your life.