To Begin

I’m at the ass-end of my thirties, and I’ve always approached blogs with a bit of trepidation. I read them, sure — some are brilliant — and part of me has always wanted to be a weekly columnist. So why not self-publish just such a column? Another part of me, though, sees blogging as an egocentric bourgeois endeavor. "Look at me!" And it most probably is. But to stop there may be missing the point. The internet, and one of its killer apps — blogging software — is just a conduit. Much of today’s best writing is now being published exclusively online.

Still, I hope my initial cynicism guides me well. The word “essay” itself is derived from the French essayer — to try or attempt. And that I will: to rise above the tossed-off email-style commentary on pop culture, and self-aggrandizing. Maybe my vision is something of a magazine in blog’s clothing. A less self-conscious McSweeney’s.

The point is to keep the cobwebs from my fingertips; work around the full-time job in the silicon mines; and post weekly essays and various viscera on life, language, sports, art, culture, leisure, pleasure, pain, and politics (What else is there, right?). Sure, I should have started five or ten years ago — when I had actual time on my hands — but that doesn’t mean it’s too late to start now.

It’s been a long time (since grad school, maybe) since excitement over an idea roused me enough at 3 a.m. to get out of bed, and write it down, as the idea for this blog did the other night. It was the name that finally got me up. It came without much struggle, and with the sort of clarity that I generally get only in the middle of the night. The name’s an allusion to E.B. White’s great collection of his Harper’s essays, One Man’s Meat, and I’m glad I wrote it down — not simply to log the thought, but to commit to it. As the great and sometimes obtuse Philadelphia Flyers' coach Fred Shero liked to say about commitment: “When you have bacon and eggs for breakfast, the chicken makes a contribution — but the pig makes a commitment.”

As they say when the gates open down in Opelousas: "Ils sont partis!"

Comments

[Kerrie]

Did you make the cow chart? (It's so much more telling than a pie chart.)

~and~

I *love* the Fred Shero quote...

[mrclean]

Yes, the Shero quote rocks!

Welcome to blogland!

[BK]

K- I hacked together the meat chart from an original I got from one of the beef lobbies -- you know, the folks who fight for their right to set up "concentrated animal feeding operations" (CAFO)s to slowly kill us with pestilent, #2-corn-fed, feedlot cattle.