Hunting for Blogfood

This blogging thing is harder than I expected. Some days are easier than others, but coming up with something useful to send to the server five or six days a week can be challenging. There's no shortage of blogfood out there, but not all is suitable for human consumption. In fact, some is just plain rancid; a lot of the political stuff falls in this category. But I imagine even a personal-journal blog would be tough to feed, sometimes, especially if one's life is marked by ordinary events. I'm glad—and you should be, too—that isn't the kind of blog I attempted. You think it's boring now? Believe me, it could be a lot worse. If my pigheaded refusal to admit that nothing much is happening were applied to a daily blog-diary . . . well, true horror lies right there.

At certain periods it becomes the dearest ambition of a man to keep a faithful record of his performances in a book; and he dashes at this work with an enthusiasm that imposes on him the notion that keeping a journal is the veriest pastime in the world, and the pleasantest. But if he only lives twenty-one days, he will find out that only those rare natures that are made up of pluck, endurance, devotion to duty for duty's sake, and invincible determination, may hope to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as the keeping of a journal and not sustain a shameful defeat.

Mark Twain — The Innocents Abroad

Some say stubbornness is a personality flaw, but I prefer to think of it as an asset; if not for my unparalleled obstinacy, my blog would contain nothing. While this might be considered good fortune for those who suffer my satirical diatribes, and the occasional sober advisory, it would waste a perfectly good opportunity to use valuable bandwidth for its own sake. It's devotion to duty for duty's sake, or to put it in more relevant terms, the invincible determination required to pump a daily monolog into the already oversaturated blogosphere. If there are blogs that harbor only the occasional post—or blogs that have faded to black entirely—it's due to a simple lack of inflexibility on the part of their authors. They have succumbed to the idea that a lack of interesting content is reason to avoid the blog altogether.