A Return to Blogging

If you're young, you probably don’t know that the word “blog” originally referred to a personal online log—a public diary. The “b” came from “web,” as in “web-log.”

The original blogs were largely that: daily missives from people with cancer or peculiar obsessions or narcissism. Some people took to using blogs for political change work. Others used them to share recipes for tricky medical conditions. A lot of us writers used them as a way to Just Write. I was one of those.

Y’all have been kind enough to sign up for my newsletter, which is (I suppose) technically a blog. And yet I have been pretty recalcitrant with this thing. The truth is, many years ago, I came to loathe being public. It seemed to bring far more grief than pleasure.

So, while I had blogged for a long, long time, I mostly gave it up. When I started In Search of Open Water, this newsletter, I did so with trepidation and, if I’m being honest, chiefly out of the desire to try to get a book deal and make a little money.

In spite of four really good proposals, the book deal never materialized. (I’ll tell you about that another day.) Instead, last June, I took a job with Heterodox Academy, one that—to my delight—chiefly consists of editing. That means I can go hide in the corner and help other people figure out what to say. I love that.

HxA did ask me to pen a weekly column, so I do that. I realize for some people, that would count as a lot of writing. But, as my mother once observed, I am the sort of writer who, when I sneeze, ten pages come out. My weekly writing for HxA is mostly just taking stock of the zeitgeist, something I don’t have much trouble doing.

What I haven’t been doing for many months is writing for writing’s sake. Blogging. From early 2024 until the fall, I had been doing a secret little blog about a house I was renovating. That was very pleasurable; there are few things as good as an old house if you want to write about life. (I’d point you to that series of posts, but I’ve deleted it.)

But then DT was elected. And I just found myself strangely unable to write. It was when I looked at my phone and showed it to my spouse, sometime around 6 a.m. the day after, and he slapped his head so hard and made a sound like someone had knifed him—it was at that moment, I felt like I could not write.

Since DT has taken office, it feels even harder. It is not that I haven’t had many thoughts and dreams worth writing down. (I can’t explain it, but I’ve had so many dreams of peace and hope? As if my brain is trying to soothe itself.) It’s not as if I don’t have much cause to do the therapeutic work that is writing for writing’s sake.

I can’t explain it. All I know is that I keep thinking back to my relatives in Kurpiki, my mother’s village, and what must have happened in their brains when the war finally started. I keep wondering if they froze in fear, the way I have frozen in fear.

(Let me just say here that, if you think I am being overly dramatic, then you are at the wrong writer’s newsletter.)

But lately—and I will write more about this soon—I have been reading with my mother Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, and Lamott is practically screaming at us about the importance of writing at Times Like This. (In case you don’t know, “Times Like This” are times when you capitalize “Times Like This.”) Not for posterity. Not for any audience. But to not drink too much. To not lose the thread. To not forget your children.

And each night after I’ve read my mother a chapter, I’ve thought: I need to start blogging again. I need to return myself to functionality, for when we know what to do and I am needed to help in the doing. Because right now, I am not functional.

Last night I read my mother the chapter on finding a writing partner. It was not easy because my right eye kept flashing lightning and an annoying gnat kept dashing in front of my field of vision and then swooping away. At first I thought it was snow lightning, for it truly was snowing hard, and I thought the gnat must be a refuge of the oranges in the fruit bowl. But soon I realized the gnat and the snow were kin; my right orb was malfunctioning.

My milk-allergy migraines descend, for mysterious reasons, on my right orbital bone only. Just before the snow and the bug appeared together, I had eaten up a big bowl of chocolate pudding made with unfamiliar cocoa, so I figured this was an atypical onset of a casein-allergy migraine. I took Benadryl and slept hard.

But this morning I awoke to find that the gnat as big as a horsefly. It was as if the pest were tied on a wire arc, like a lure, the other end of the bouncy wire mounted atop my head. Every time I turned my head, the horsefly zipped left or right, up or down.

The good news, following an emergency eye exam: it is merely a vitreous detachment, not a retinal detachment. Which means it is just bloody annoying.

But in the space between last night—when I did a little googling and decided, in my natural pessimism, it was either retinal detachment or macular degeneration or M.S. like my father had—and the time I saw the eye doctor, I started thinking about how maybe I don’t have that much more time to write. And how I am not much use to people if I am not writing, not because they need my writing, but because writing makes me tolerable, and sometimes useful.

All of this is to say I think I am going to start blogging again, as in writing a web-log. It is likely to contain a lot of stupid and pointless things, and a lot of uncomfortable political musings, so if you don’t want that, now is the time to get out.

If you want to stay and see how it goes, I’ve decided to turn on comments. To post a comment, you have to go to the actual site and login or some such. So, when you get a newsletter post in your email, just click on “view in browser” and that should take you to the right place. I think you can also turn off the messages coming to your email and just go look at the website when you feel like looking.

That's all for today.