I have moved my blogging operations over to this quadrant of the Internet — that is, far away from the sportsy corner where Me and Pedro sits, collecting sad dust, the memory of an experiment gone horribly wrong, sad in a profound way; it is incredibly unfortunate that I was not able to make that particular project work in any sort of meaningful way. The project was this: a dear, old friend of mine and I were to blog about the Boston Red Sox from either side of America, and it bombed spectacularly, owing to our complete inability to work together whatsoever. After a flurry of nasty, unnecessary emails — most of them, I suspect, authored by myself — the site has become sort of a living tombstone to our work. If the blog is not dead it's only because Google says it's not dead and I can't bring myself to erase it, as if that will finally end the experiment once and for all. But the truth is the experiment is long over, and I keep the blog up in the hopes that a new one can crop in that place, the brainchild of the two founders of said blog being its authors, but I cannot post there alone with any sort of authority. I feel like only half of the necessary voices are coming through there, as I never intended it to be my platform for talking about anything — I wanted it to be more a place of discussing the events of the day. I've let it slide from that, and it is my fault, and we are not starting here anew so much as we are starting something different.
This is just going to be a blog, one without a point and hopefully, without much of a readership. If I am to gain readers it will have to be by my hand alone, and they will have to follow me through what will be, inevitably, a rollercoaster of ideas and theories for which they will not likely have the patience, but if they do, it is my hope they will learn something if only, I don't know, how not to write. The editing on this site will be sparse and the prose free-flowing, as I don't intend to start reading everything over a million times, though I invite you to do so. Of course, doing so would require you to read it once, and I trust I'm already trying your patience with that.
A large part of me wants to start this blog in memory of David Foster Wallace, whose death I wrote about here and whose works seems, in the wake of his death, far more accessible than it did before. This sounds horrible, at least in my head, because I do not mean it in the sense of "He's dead, let me read his work for a month and then go on with my life." No. What I mean, and what I express somewhat in the article, is that his work was in some ways too gravitationally strong; it was hard to read without getting sucked toward the bottom of whatever pit he was, figuratively, writing from. That might sound childish, but I always felt that there was no end to Wallace, and now that he has passed, he has a complete set of works from which to work, and I can set about moving toward finishing them. It is in my nature to be this way, and I cannot apologize for it. In some ways, it is even inspiring, but enough about that.
For y'all,
BJ
ALSO: This blog will probably be a lot more playful than this opening salvo, but you had to be warned. I probably won't write very often, because when I have active blogs, all I ever do is think about things that would make good blog posts, and I get all freaked out that what I'm writing is shit. So hopefully I can do some good stuff by not thinking about it. Unless this is another spiral coming, but I'm trying to limit my own expectations on myself. This is something I'm often not very good at. It seems to me to be a contradiction of having a blog, or at least one of any literary aspiration, that all I want is people to read this, but by thinking that constantly, I produce stuff that no one wants to read. Or maybe it's all in my head. Who knows. Can you tell I've read DFW lately? Yeesh, there's probably a lot of this going around right now. It's sad. It really is. I recommend McSweeneys' memories page; it taught me more about DFW, the person, than really anything I've ever read ever. It mostly taught me that any non-contact with DFW I did not have was my fault alone, as he was as singularly reachable as he was talented, so I'm determined not to let that happen to me with my favorite authors/people again. (You know, why not try at things, at least?) My favorite tribute is by Adrienne Miller, who ends her story with:
He could also be pissy. He could also be annoying. He could be mean. He could be remote, and ruthless, and reckless. He was filled with towering rages. He said that he believed he was 85 percent sincere and 15 percent full of shit. He lied, but then he would admit that he had been lying, and would apologize for it, excessively. But he tried to tell the truth. He tried to find the truth. He tried to be good, and he was. He was good. He was better than all of us put together.This is something you forget during depression — how very loved you are, at all times, by people you don't think have the time or effort to do so. It's so damn inspiring. It really is.And he was—is—loved.
He is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved he is loved.
