I was chatting to a friend, saying I was on a blogging spree, and that I’d thought about blogging about why I blog, but had felt it was too self referential. So she suggested I should blog about the fact that I’d decided not to blog about blogging 🙂

So here I am, blogging about it.

I’m not sure why I blog. I accuse myself of vanity sometimes, thinking that anyone might actually care to read the random shit that I’m thinking about. But maybe even if I was the only person here, I’d still blog. People write diaries after all, with no intention of anyone else ever reading then. But then, why am I not writing a diary, or a private journal, why do I choose to blog publically?

Maybe it’s a pretense at keeping in touch with some friends, since I am clearly unable to keep in touch any other way. I guess allowing comments adds the illusion that it’s a two way keeping in touch process. To some extent it is a way of letting my friends know what I’m up to, but then, what I’m up to is pretty much the same as 10 years ago, and it’s not much, so I could get away with posting a boilerplate entry every 10 years.

Since I started using bulletin boards and the ‘net I’ve always made ‘diary’ style posts, somewhere, at some time. Even when I haven’t been blogging I’ve made posts in forums or other locations which have basically been reflections and blogs. I thought about taking some of them and re-posting them as blog entries on here, just to keep everything in one place, but I’m not sure of the overall value. Most of them are ‘of the moment’, and I’m not sure anyones going to trawl back through the stuff here just to find a forum posting I made in 2004 which might have been a blog entry had I been blogging at the time.

I like to pretend I’m creative and that in some way blogging is my creative outlet. I pretend I’m actually just too lazy to write a whole book so I blog to fill the need, and that if I wasn’t lazy I’d write a book (the reality is that I have loads of ideas for the first two paragraphs of a book and then nothing else).

Maybe I just like inflicting my random thought processes on the world, in the hope that I can shape it to more closely resemble how I think it should be. Maybe I’m blogging my random thoughts so that I can understand how I think the world should be. I think that’s probably it, that by writing my random thoughts, pretty much as they come to the front of my fingers really helps me understand my view, because I don’t always know where this stuff is going. I never knew I was going to write this paragraph for example until I was three quarters of the way through it.

So I guess I’m exploring, how I feel and what I think, about the most trivial and pointless things in life, and then pushing it out onto the internet, home of the trivial, land of the pointless, so that people with the misfortune of knowing me may feel obliged to sit through it and wonder why the hell they just wasted 10 minutes of their lives.

Welcome aboard.