Increasingly I Don't Know What to Say

You probably thought I forgot about that request for feedback I posted, didn't you? I didn't. I read and enjoyed every response. Unfortunately, for reasons that are obvious to me now but should have been obvious to me then, none of those responses gave me the answer I needed (because they couldn't): Why the hell do I blog?

Here were some of the answers I received from all of you:

Started one to see where it might lead and to hopefully improve my writing and computer skills. Still don’t know where it will lead. My writing hasn’t improved even slightly but my computer skills may have.

Please note that Rob is being a dirty, dirty liar about his writing skills.

I enjoy writing, and blogging allows me to vent about issues that I might otherwise bend poor Mr. Cracker's ear about incessantly (not that I don't do that anyway sometimes).

Oh, yes. I am a talkative person in a relationship with a taciturn one. Blogging keeps the peace (and quiet).

I'm a great big ol' ball of narcissism.

Margi demonstrates how to win, in one shot, both the "Most Honest Answer" and the "Most Applicable to my Own Situation" awards.

John done gimme a whole post about why he keeps a weblog. Here's some of it:

First and foremost, it’s a way for me to exercise my non-technical writing muscles. I’m still not in shape, but the atrophy that had set in over the past 5 years has been halted, possibly reversed. As I stated in the first post (and tried to reflect in the blog title), most of what’s on the Net is garbage, possibly including this site.

Nah! to that last remark.

I also got a couple responses from the blogless about why they read weblogs. From 1bodyand2faces:

For enjoyable writing style, for intelligent people whose sense of humor clicks with mine, for people who can come at something from a different angle than the party line, and get me to see their POV, for people who can tell an interesting story in an interesting way. And did I mention sense of humor? Key.

I have to agree about the sense of humor. There are, at least among the political weblogs, too many bloggers who treat this as a negative, as a sign of unseriousness. May they be sentenced to a continuous, week-long slapping upside the head with the P.J. O'Rourke essay, "A Serious Problem:"

Life is weighty, important, grave, critical, momentous, etc. Not for nothing does Roget's Thesaurus say, "Antonyms--See DRUNKENNESS, FRIVOLITY, PLAYFULNESS, UNIMPORTANCE." Yes, indeed, let's see them right away.

And from Ron:

I like essays. The blog is a great format for it. You generally get a lot of the writers personality or personna.

I agree. I love essays. One of the things that first cheesed me off about weblog rankings is the relative underranking of essayists versus, say, masters of the I-shaped post.

(More later--I just realized Molto Mario's on. I don't know why it's so helpful to me to work out to fat men cooking fatty foods, but I can go twice as long on the treadmill to that kind of thing, provided "that kind of thing" is not "Emeril." Perverse!)