Friday, November 2, 2007

(Scene opens with our hero, alone on a stage, writing on a laptop computer...)

About ten years ago or so, I started a blog-type thing at my old job. It was a hard-hitting, up-to-date website detailing the days top issues, such as which members of Congress were ugly, and whether or not you could be killed by a baby penguin. It was a lot of fun, kept me busy, and most importantly, kept the public informed with the kind of high-quality information they just couldn’t get from the traditional media. To date, the page has logged over 250,000 views - impressive for a site that hasn’t been updated in nearly four years, and proof that there is still nothing good on the internet.

Unfortunately, circumstances arose which caused me to abandon the website – I got a job that required actual work, and my wife popped out a coupla kids. Add to that the time constraints inherent in my crack addiction, lasso lessons, fierce loyalty to the DC Rollergirls (“With Liberty and Justice to Brawl”), and m aking my own sushi, and I had very little time for the high-quality intellectual material my audience had come to love.

Not only that, but everyone and their sister began creating blogs, many about the most meaningless, boring things. “Oh, I just had a hard time at the DMV, I’ll blog about it!” “Oh, I found a great recipe for chicken marsala, better blog about it!” “Oh, I saw Senator Martinez in an alley behind a strip joint getting a hummer from a twelve year-old Asian boy, perhaps that’s newsworthy!” Seriously people, get a life.

I have put off creating a blog for two reasons:

1) No one cares what I have to say. Nor should they.

2) I don’t care what other people have to say. It’s like when someone tells you that you look good, or they like your outfit, when in fact they’re really fishing for compliments about themselves. “Oh, you look good too!” I didn’t read other blogs, yet I knew if I began one myself, I would expect people to not only read mine but comment on how wonderful it was. This is selfish.

However, I have come to a realization – selfish is who I am. It’s how I roll. Not only that, I’ve got some time on my hands these days. I’m still busy as a mofucker at work, but the beauty of blogs is, I suppose, that if you have one funny thought in a whole day, you post it and leave it be, rather than spend the kind of time I did on the old website turning it into 500 words. I mean, some of those articles took up to twenty minutes to write, and that doesn’t include finding funny pictures.

Not only that, I’ve got a wealth of material to choose from these days. I still live and work in the weirdest city in the world, I’ve got two children, and of course I’m going through a sex change. I know what you’re thinking – there are hundreds if not billions of bloggers in DC, everyone blogs about their kids, and my finally becoming a man is not headline news. The fact is, however, that my blog will be funny, my kids are MUCH cuter and funnier than anyone else’s moronic critters, and penis reassignment surgery is rare and not well documented.

So with that, welcome to the Manchingo Coniglium. (See, the last website had a catchy, easy-to-remember name, the Froo Froo, and a simple URL; I decided to make this thing next to impossible to find and/or pronounce, just for shits and giggles.) Stop by every once in a while, put your virtual feet up, have a virtual glass of apple juice, and bask in the virtual comedy.

I leave you for now with a quote from Steven Wright, talking about painting the ceiling of his bedroom as a kid:

“I painted Jesus and Santa Claus on a seesaw. I put Jesus at the bottom, even though he’s lighter.

Cuz he’s Jesus.”

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I do NOT blog about nothing. I blog about high-quality issues, such as olives. And how much I loathe them. I think you can trace my long-term relationship with a closeted homosexual right back to you and damn olives. And I fully expect everyone to think I'm a goddess and worship me because I blog so damn well.

Zanzibar Buck Buck McFate said...

Seriously, can you "blog well?" You can be a good baseball player, you can play the violin well, but blogging? Hell, my four year-old son could mash a keyboard and call it blogging. "I'm not restricted by the chains of language barriers," he'd say. "I'm bigger than that." He's always saying that.

Anonymous said...

Welcome back to the land of the technologically-alive. While I have no doubt that you'd consider what you used to do to be "blogging," I'm not sure that's right. It was more like "creating an HTML-deficient website updated semi-regularly."