Editor’s Note: In the past few days, I’ve noticed a number of the bloggers I follow I have re-shared the first blog post they ever scribbled. I’m not sure why this is happening. Maybe it’s just one of those odd flashpoints where multiple people suddenly do the same thing without any choreography involved, or maybe some High Priestess Blogging Goddess has decreed that this is the current trending thing to do. I don’t know. I don’t know a lot of things, buy you learn with age that it doesn’t matter what you know, it matters what you do and why you do it.
In any case, the concept intrigued me, and I dug into the archives, all the way back to my virginal voyage, eight years ago. (You could say that time flies, but it doesn’t, really. It hovers and then darts, sometimes whipping and sometimes crawling, and suddenly you are 50 looking at 51 coming down the street yet the hopefulness of 9 still beats in your heart.)
The initial thing that strikes me about this inaugural post is that I un-creatively christened it “The First One”. Clearly, I had no plan in mind. (For those who have faithfully followed me since ground zero, all one of you, you may recall that I continued this number scheme for some time, with “The Third One” and “The Twenty-Second One” and “The Seventy-Seventh One”. There were nearly 100 posts in my primitive coffer before it even occurred to me that I should get a bit more industrious with the titles for my posts.
The second, more tender (at least to me) impression from this first toe dipped in the pool of blogging is my absolute naiveté and accompanying ignorant bravado. At the time, I was under the false impression that most starry-eyed bloggers have when they first, fumblingly figure out how to maneuver the intricacies of a blogging platform: If I simply share my truth, thousands of followers will flock to my Well of Inspiration within mere hours.
This doesn’t happen, of course, at least not for most of us. (There are those rare, cosmic moments when a random someone posts a photo of them making toast and suddenly they are trending on every social media site on the planet. This is known as “The Kardashian Method”, a twist of happenstance that rarely sticks to the dartboard of public perception.) In the real world, most bloggers only get the tiniest bit of anywhere with endless hours of self-promotion and constant, annoying begging for attention.
I’m not good with that, the begging. I have a hard enough time responding to text messages from my mother, with her wondering why I don’t call her more often. I’m not skilled in blowing my own trumpet. Still, looking back, touching what once was, I can’t help but remember the hopefulness of being 9…
The First One
So anyway, it was another one of those sucky days at work (Dear Gawd, take me now, will there EVER be a non-sucky day at work?) when Tiffany, and her hair, was rambling on about some yahoo cousin of hers that had a real-life Blog and it was SO fascinating and SO impressive we must all run out immediately and start our own Blogs. I, of course, continued to smoke my cigarette and nod at appropriate moments while the spew of words out of her exquisitely-lipsticked mouth reached G-Force levels. Because this is what we do. She gushes forth, I grunt with minimal enthusiasm, and we love each other for it. And so it went, as it always does. Diva Tiffany, with the arms flailing and the we-must-do-this-now flatulence, and me having no intention whatsoever of doing whatever she is babbling about.
Flash forward to now. I’m still signed into the network at work, struggling valiantly to move the tiny cogs that I own in the behemoth Verizon machine. It’s 9:30 at night. (Insert your own time zone, look at all the lonely people, waiting for life to pass them by.) Pondering the micro-bits of life that I can actually call my own. When I have an epiphany of sorts. (Yes, Dearest Tiff, yet another tribute to you in using that word. You are my muse, Babbling Brook.) Why NOT start a Blog? Why NOT chain myself to yet another immense task, being the medicated workaholic that I am? I can finally drop the grunting and begin the pontificating. I can be heard! At least by random web surfers who have grown tired of the porn websites and click on this site out of sheer boredom. The world is my oyster.
So I did it, people. I’ve started a Blog. Praise me.
Game on.
Editor’s Note, Part 2: Cherish everything that made you what you are. And wake up more determined in the morning…
(Originally published in “The Sound and the Fury” on 05/06/08. Actual post not changed, editorial content fresh and hopefully un-begging…)
Categories: The Journey
Bonnywood Manor 
I love that you started with “So anyway,” as if you were in the middle of a conversation. That set the stage perfectly!
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Thank you! That’s just one of my little writing quirks, throwing folks into the middle of whatever. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t… 😉
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Unless I want to lull the public into a coma, or deep depression, then I won’t be publishing my first ever blog post.
Very eloquent for a first post. I definitely would have followed you back then.
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Now, now, I’m sure you’re first post was beautifully elegant and people swooned. And at least you’re still here, right? The blogosphere is littered with the carcasses of blogs where “writers” scribbled out two measly posts, realized that gaining a following takes WORK, and those unfocused people quickly faded into the night…
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Nice first post – quirky enough to gain attention – but not over the top. Well balanced. I note that you have progressed to being nicely unbalanced – and I say that with the deepest affection – which is why I follow you. Balance is waaaaaay over-rated.
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Thanks, Claudette! Yep, balance is not really one of my goals, unless it comes to my checking account… 😉
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Yeah, a positive balance in there is always – well, positive!
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What a woman that Tiffany is 🙂
You made a solid humourous start that’s for sure.
It’s funny to look back when we were naive to what the blogosphere had in store. My 1500 word stories were swiftly ignored, so I tuned them down to the 500 mark.
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I’ll have to admit that I still haven’t learned the lesson about shorter blog posts. I continue to throw weighty pieces out there that would sink the Titanic once more. Part of it is the rebel in me (why should I restrict my writing to an “ideal” length concocted by “media savvy” people who probably aren’t even actual writers?), but the bigger part is that the people who DO like my long-form posts are the same folks who have stayed with me through all my various blog incarnations and they keep coming back. THAT’s who I’m writing for, the people who don’t care about convention and instead trust the writer to take them somewhere interesting. (I know, I know, a bit smarmy of me, but I really believe it. A good story should not be manipulated to fit a mandated design; rather, the story should create a new design…)
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I agree with you. And your stories are great. I don’t like shortening stories, I dont even like mentioning keep it to 500 words or so because it’s a restrictive practice and entirely a personal choice, but my reality has been that anything ‘long’ hardly gets read.
I’m a bit of a sucker for more comments and likes too.
Now I have more followers that might change. I tend to keep my longer posts for short story submissions or a collection.
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Haha! I love the final address to your readers in that first blog post of yours. I don’t identify with bored-porn-watching web surfers but I found it extremely funny ^^. Thank you for sharing that!
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I’m glad you enjoyed it. And to further complicate the relationship I have with the porn crowd, there’s a whole piece somewhere in this mess of mine wherein I babble about a series I did, “Village of the Damned”, that somehow keeps attracting people looking for sex stories. The world is quite interesting, indeed…
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Haha! I am intrigued! I will look for this story of yours 🙂 Though with such a title I would expect zombies more like.
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