What Blogging Is Really For

You may want to unsubscribe to this blog. I’ll be taking it in a new direction over the coming weeks.

A blog is about daily interaction, it’s about telling a story in easily consumable daily digests. A blog isn’t a place for articles — that’s a different form of writing. A blog is something that is unique unto itself: it’s a place for journaling about a topic. It’s a place to show a mind in motion, a platform to ruminate over something you’re interested in.

This blog? It’s about being a traveling chronicler of culture and global transitions and everything that goes into that. It’s the background story behind my articles and books and other products of big media.

However, the wheels often come off at various junctions throughout the year. I blog for a few weeks or months straight and then I get caught up on a post and go on an extended hiatus. I’ve looked back over the history of these obstructions and it seems as if they usually come when I’m on a post that I want to do especially well or otherwise demands a heightened amount of attention and time. Unfortunately, these are, obviously, some of the more interesting, complex posts on this blog — the stuff worth doing well.

The problem with this is that these posts are like a tractor trailer jackknifed on a highway: the block the flow of everything else.

Blogs need to be somewhat linear — you can’t really jump around too much in time or else everything gets confusing. So when I have a post that takes an additional amount of time the works get clogged up: new drafts pile up behind and, before long, I’m staring down a mountain of posts that will take a large amount of time and effort to process.

I have other things to do throughout the course of a day than blog. I make money on here — I believe this blog brought in around $7,500 last year — but it’s not my main stream of income. This is the money that I buy cameras with. It’s extra cash that I keep on the side to play with. I have a generally overwhelming amount of other work to do, so when I have a 20-draft-pile-up on this blog to do it’s easy to look the other way.

Basically, I have to chuck my pretenses and give up writing article-type blog posts. While I enjoy having an outlet for stories that don’t fit in on the other publications that I produce content for, they just take way too long.

They take too long and result in the complete dismantling of the blog’s broader narrative.

Why is this important?

Primarily, because this blog is where I keep everything straight. Where I am, what I’m doing, what I’m feeling, who I’m with, what I’m working on. This is the only record of this that I have.

This is important to me because I am prone to extreme detachment and can become a little out of touch with day to day reality. I go into my cycle of content collection and production that I forget about all else. I usually have no idea what day of the week it is, I have to think hard about what month it is, and I easily lose track of, well, just about everything. A couple times a week I wake up and I have to throttle my memory to come up with what continent I’m on.

…The long term side-effects of perpetual travel, I suppose.

I either work on my own platforms or on projects. I have no regular job. I don’t wake up each day and go into work for the same company with the same boss and the same co-workers. I don’t have a regular schedule… I don’t have any schedule at all. I really have no framework. I have little sense of chronology. My life feels like that scene in all those movies where the astronaut helplessly floats away into space.

So this blog is pretty much the only framework that I have. I’ve been doing it since 2005 — since I was just a kid. It’s the nervous system of my adulthood — it just kind of extends through everything. It’s the tracks that I leave in the snow. I can look back along them and see where I’ve come from and take waypoints on where I’m going. Without this I’m like a f’cking astronaut.

I also have a fear of forgetting. The only thing a traveler has are memories. I want mine ordered, filed away, and easy to recall. I think of this blog as my memory jar. So it’s format is going to start resembling more of a daily diary than a place for artfully assembled articles and stories.

Yeah, you may want to unsubscribe.

Apologies.

Walk Slow,

Wade