So It Begins

A number of people over the years urged me to create a blog. (I won’t call you out here, in case you start reading this one and quickly regret the enthusiasm.) I long resisted the idea.

Writing a blog struck me as self-indulgent. I wasn’t sure I really had anything to say, or worth reading about. Perhaps worst of all, everybody and his brother (or sister) blogs these days. I had to take a hard look at myself. I mean, am I on Facebook? No. Do I text? No. Do I even have an electronic gizmo on which to text? No. So, why start a blog?

Well, I do like to write, for one thing. For another, I do have opinions—observations, joys and rants—that I enjoy sharing with friends. I’ve been told I “give good e-mail.” I hope so. I’m a journalist by background, so I like telling a story in an economy of words. I love language and wordplay, so I try to pique and entertain. I’m a wiseass by nature, so I try to be funny—ideally, but not always, where appropriate. Sometimes, though—and I’m a little embarrassed to concede my ego—I want a larger audience than one-on-one e-mail can afford.

Some people have urged me to write a novel or book of short stories. I appreciate the show of confidence, but I can’t see that ever happening. I lack the breadth of imagination, and I’m insufficiently disciplined. What is fiction writing if not the intersection of vision, talent and industry? Having only (maybe) one of the three isn’t enough.

Which is why blogging has come to look attractive to me, despite its confounding popularity. Blog posts needn’t be long. I’ll never have to make things up from whole cloth. I can riff on what I know, what I just read or saw, what strikes me as amusing, what I find maddening. I can treat posts casually, kind of like long e-mail messages—and, in so doing, hopefully avoid inertia.

So, I’ve decided to give this a shot. My goal is to write about things I find interesting, and to present those musings in an engaging way. Sometimes posts will touch on my own life and circumstances, but more often, I hope, they won’t. Because the last thing I want to do is bore anybody, and in my mind whenever anyone starts closely chronicling his or her daily life, the potential for tedium is gigantic.

One last note: The name of this blog is my joke on myself, given that it’s taken me 52 years to challenge myself in this way, and given my fear at the start that I’m too lazy to keep this thing going. The Webster’s definition of lassitude is “a condition of weariness, listlessness, or debility: fatigue.” I hope not to make readers weary or fatigued. I guess we’ll see. Here goes nuthin’.