Kicking and Screaming

I'm one of those people who has to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future. It's not that I'm conservative, or a traditionist, or an armchair Lludite that spits pumpkin seeds at progress. I think I'm just lazy and not changing requires me to expend less energy than changing.

Consider: I used to dismiss iPods as the last word in pretentious accessorization. "Those things are for feckless people who can't sit still and wait for the bus calmly like the rest of us!" Then I got an iPod and realized that they were pretty handy, just the thing when you just have to listen to Dark Tranquility on a Mexican beach at midnight and you've negligently forgotten to bring your home stereo with you.

But I'm not really talking about iPods; I'm talking about my attitude toward postmodern stuff in general. Specifically blogs. I am not a fan of talk radio. Talk radio of any persuasion generally gives me the shivers, and for a long time I dismissed blogs as a kind of cybernetic version of talk radio. I have an old essay of mine where I said "Right, I want to read someone's poorly-organized and probably misspelled rants about as much as I want a lump of hot plutonium."

I suppose I should keep an eye out for the UPS truck, as I'm expecting to receive my lump of hot plutonium any day now. Not only have I begun reading blogs lately, but I now find myself in the somewhat uncomfortable position of actually having one (blog experts might wish to point out that a blog is as a blog does, and until mine actually expresses a point of view, it isn't a blog, it's junk).

How did this happen? What propelled me, kicking and screaming, out of my chair and into blogdom? I blame Floyd Landis, actually. I've been reading a bit about him and the doping allegations on the Internet, and there was a link that said something along the lines of See What The Blogs Are Saying. Normally I avoid those links as though they actually read Click Here To Contract Tuberculosis. But being moderately interested in the Tour de France and its latest flap, I went to said blogs and read a bit, and discovered that there was more to them than just frothing mouths and spittle-flecked invective. There is some of that, to be sure sure, but I was sufficiently calmed by what I read to think about starting a blog of my own.

"But what would you write about?" is the obvious question. I don't know. I'll figure that out as I go.