Why blog?
I've decided there really isn't any need for me to separate my comments into a "serious" blog and a "personal" blog. Each blog would just be updated half as often. So I've copied what little content I'd placed in the second blog into this one here. The other one will disappear soon, if it hasn't already.

Glenn Reynolds, Steven den Beste, and James Lileks are among the best there is at what they do. Their styles are disparate, as they should be, given their differing backgrounds, interests, and goals, but I admire them all. When I compare my own hunting and pecking to their mastery of the form, I feel... unfocused.

What I finally realized was that I was in danger of forgetting why I blog in the first place.

I write. It is not, and never has been, what I do for a living, but it's what I do. I've been writing for an APA (amateur press alliance) for over twenty years now, and in that time I've only missed one deadline. Much of what I put on this page finds it way into my APA pages as well: This is, in many ways, a "first draft" for that.

My goal is simply to present a point of view. It's what we all owe to the ongoing human conversation, in which we each perceive the world we share and describe it to each other -- hopefully to better understand it, each other, and ourselves.

If this page seems unfocused, it's because I am. It's by design, on purpose. I don't have the desire to impose sufficient dicipline on my writing (at least, not this writing) that the question "What is this blog about?" can have a simple answer, other than this: It's about me. It's about the world I see myself at the center of. Sometimes it'll be about the war. Other times it'll be about what's on television. I might mention the latest stupid politician quote (we never seem to run out of those). I might mention how much I enjoyed the "Amazing Spider-Man" Coming Home trade paperback.

Hope that's OK.

On rereading this post thus far it seems rather sophomoric, like college students at 3am discussing how they can know that those parts of the world they can't see are still there. Oh, well. Like Georgia weather, the atmosphere here is unstable: If you don't like it, wait five minutes.