To Blog or not to Blog?

My lovely wife has been pushing me to start a blog for a while now. I generally shy away from quirky fads and I have, until now, resisted this one. But mainly because of the `time commitment'. Not only my time - as it takes me an incredible amount of time to actually get my point across (assuming I have a point in the first place) - but I have serious questions about anybody who would come here and waste their valuable time reading my ramblings.

As you are probably aware, the term `blog' was derived from `web log'. I have never liked the term `blog'. Would `weblog' have been to terribly long to say and/or write? For centuries, people have been scrawling their inner thoughts and feelings into a `diary' with little to no resistance to the three syllable, feminine sounding, word.

There was no rush to call that `paper log' a `plog'. And make no mistake about it, as much as all the men out there would like to deny it, a blog is just a glorified diary. And why would anybody want to write in a diary that can be read by pretty much anybody in the world?

I have not yet reconciled in my own mind the pros and cons of private-blog vs. blog-to-the-nations. I have chosen to begin with a public (but not advertised) blog. If I find that my readers (both of them) begin to be heckled and ridiculed for leaving comments here, I reserve the right to go private at a later, undisclosed time.

I have no idea how often I will update my diary, er blog. But in the absence of anything substantial to say, I will most likely be `republishing' some of my backwash stories. These `stories' are actually just stuff I've typed up in the past, they were usually emailed to a handful of family/friends, some of which actually read them. Those are probably the same people who are scrolling their mouse pointer toward the `Back' button and won't even get to the end of this sentence. Some entries will be humorous (to me anyway), and some will be just dumb, but that's the beauty of it, reading this blog is totally voluntary. So basically, this is my disclaimer (which by reading my blog, you implicitly agree to):

If you don't like reading my endless ramblings, leave. Go somewhere like my wife's blog where her posts are not only readable and cohesive, but they actually have meaning and/or insight.

I had planned on being very profound in my opening monolog, but then I thought `Why try to be witty and creative here?' It would just give you, my readers, a false sense of hope that my follow up entries would contain those characteristics also. Instead, I decided to make this just as choppy and unfollowable (new word) as most subsequent posts will be.

You will also notice that I love to use parenthesis (they are kind of my way of setting apart little thoughts that I would normally just say in an actual conversation, even though they are frequently off topic), you will notice that they don't really add much to the underlying meaning of the sentence, but I love them anyway. Also, my use of the comma might leave you gasping for air and looking for the next actual breaking point; well, this ain't no grammar lesson and you will either
A) Live with it, or
B) Go away.

This blog will NOT be an accurate `Day in the Life' type of log. It will not contain all the positive day to day stuff that I have been blessed with (family, job and health). It might even seem biased toward pessimism, but this is only because most of the things I like to write about are negative experiences. I like to think of it as some sort of therapy I go through.
I figure if I can laugh at all the crud that comes my way, I will live longer (or maybe I just like ripping on people).

One last thing (as if there could be more than one `last' thing anyway): Please leave comments after reading this and/or other entries letting me know, on a scale from 1 to 328 how much you enjoyed it (or not so much), with `1' being the lowest (duh). Your feedback will help me become a better person and allow me to re-evaluate my behavior in the future, it will influence who I am. Yeah, right, -strike that last sentence-, actually I just want to know who is snooping around in my little corner of the web.

There you have it. I have officially started my very first blog.

Let the games begin.