The First One

The first time I ever wrote something that could be considered a blog was in 2004, right after I signed up for the newfangled 'myspace' thing that all the other kids were talking about. I didn't think of it as a blog then, and for the next year or two I continued to not think of it as a blog. I primarily considered MySpace as a tool for meeting and engaging in sexual activities with young and attractive females I would not have otherwise met or had to courage to talk to in person, as I've always been better with written words than spoken ones.

Even as I moved beyond this stage (Which is actually a god damn lie, I was trying to snag girls on MySpace up until I forgot my password to it and stopped thinking about it--Facebook was the new hotness) I still didn't really want to consider the things I was writing on MySpace constituted a blog, they were just things I wrote. I actually wrote and entire serialized short story on there, a pretty horrible one with bleach-blond assassins and Irish swordsmen in suit jackets based on a series of pictures my Polish friend and I took in the seriously limited amount of alleys that Lake Charles, my home town, has.

I haven't spoken to my Polish friend in years. Often times I wonder how he's doing.

The thing I was doing on MySpace quickly became a blog once a girl I liked stopped dating me--an awfully cliche way to kick off the serious blogging I suppose, but with good reason. When people become emotional they seek to vent that emotion in whatever way possible, some with drink, others with violence. Some write songs or draw pictures. I was always to lazy to develop any sort of real skills in my life, so I would write things. Not poetry or music or anything like that, just rambling block paragraphs of mental dross that would take time and leave my hunting-and-pecking fingertips numb from the hard hitting of keys on my keyboard. My entries on MySpace then were angry, hurt, and confused--the writing of a child losing his childhood and becoming more and more adult. Eventually I got over the girl and the blogs became less angry, and--with the move to Facebook and severely limited number of characters there--my "blogging" days ended with very little fanfare.

So now here I am again, typing thoughts into a space where people I've never met, seen, or even considered could someday read them for whatever insane reason they may have for doing so. I suppose that, since I am writing under my real and actual name I should be careful about what I write, since employers or assassins could look me up and take me out with whatever sort of horrible embarrassing information I post here, but somehow I doubt that will be a problem.

The question for now is, why blog? Why after four or so years would I start this all over again? I'm not looking for internet girls anymore, I'm living with one of them and that can make finding new ones hard (being in love makes it hard too, but that doesn't really sound very sexy.) The honest truth is I actually sat down at my computer about an hour ago or so with the intention of writing something--something that is not a blog but in fact a story. That isn't the point, though. The point is that while I wanted to want to write this story, I found that what I actually wanted to do was just write. I wanted to write the words as they came to me and not try to twist my thoughts into the story that I wanted to write, I wanted to just listen to music and tap the keyboard and look at what wound up on the screen and hit share and know that people could see it when they couldn't see the stories I wrote.

Because I'm sad.

Because I'm scared.

Because I'm so anxious and worried that my head is pounding and my guts feel like they're trying to punch their way out of my stomach.

I'm not that guy, see, I know these days a lot of people deal with a lot of stress. I know they take pills and go see therapists and have support groups or whatever. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that--and honestly this last year has me thinking more and more I should get to know certain people in these groups better and figure out why I've suddenly gone over to their side. I used to consider myself a very laid back dude, after all. I felt like I had a pretty decent handle on things, even when I was broke or heartbroken or whatever. Now it feels like its too much to deal with, like all of the troubles that I continually put off or avoid in whatever way I can have mounted up and up and up--a mile deep snow drift trembling against some small, crucial pebble just waiting for that small stone to slip ever so slightly and release an avalanche of chaos to crush the peaceful little town that in this metaphor is my sanity.

You might be able to see how this isn't conducive to the good writing of fictional material.

And that's really depressing, because doing that is something that I love very much. It's seriously one of my favorite things in the world to do.

But writing fiction is hard, harder than some people might think. Especially if you're trying to write good fiction. Or at least decent fiction. It's more work than art, certainly. The idea is the simple part. It's getting that idea all down on paper (or the hard drive I guess, this is the 21st century after all, and Egon's words about print have never been truer) without ruining it that's the hard part.

But this writing, blogging, that's easy. At least the way I do it is easy. I'm not an avid read of any blogs, I don't know the first 'thing' about them, and I'm sure many serious bloggers put plenty of time and effort into their blogs, and do research and proofreading and drafts and all that awesome cool stuff you get to do when you care about what you're writing and kudos to them. But I don't. Not when I'm writing like this. I mean, look the those two preceeding sentences, if you could even call them that; fragments starting with conjunctions! That's the worst kind of sloppy writing. But here I don't care (I did it again! I actually do it a lot,) here I'm just typing down whatever I'm thinking and following the thread of thought until it runs out.

Which means that this thing is going to be long and rambling and confused, and brings me back to the reason I'm writing this blog. Because I want to write, but I find that my current emotional and mental state allows me only to write. Because typing all of this stuff out into the 'cloud' makes me feel a little less insane for a moment. I could do it in my head, I suppose, but seeing your thoughts down on the page or screen or whatever has, for me at least, a calming, ordering effect on those chaotic thoughts. I could do it in a private word document or something and just go nuts, say fuck a lot and not worry about someone I don't want reading this stuff seeing it--but that wouldn't be the same either.

I said earlier I liked to write stories, that it was one of my most favorite things in the world to do. That's still true. But do you know what I love even more than writing those stories?

Seeing people read them.

I know there's this stereotype of a writer or person who wants to be a writer being some intensely private person like Emily Dickinson or something who just sits alone at their desk and writes all this stuff in their own little book and doesn't care what anyone else thinks about their writing.

I think that's bullshit.

I think people who want to be writers want to have readers. I have plenty of stories that I'll never try to write down, I'll just run them through my brain like my own private theatre and enjoy the hell out of them, and they'll always be better than anything I could actually write, because they can always change. As long as the stories are in my head they're totally mutable. If I don't like something I can just morph it around and make it new and the story is none the worse for it. When I write them down, the stories become fixed, they're down, they're written and they can't be changed (well they can, George Lucas shows us this every other year...but they shouldn't). I think most people have that mental story telling thing going on, it's the people who want to write that take the enormous risk of slapping it down in writing and hoping it works.

So what I'm trying to say is I like attention, and that's why I'm writing this sort of stupidity where people can see it.

Whether or not I ever put in another entry to this blog, or even publish this one, is not something I'm too sure of--but I think I probably will. Even if people don't read it, hell, probably more if they don't, then I won't feel to pressured.

In closing, if you've somehow stumbled on to this thing and for whatever crazy reason slogged through all of my words then let me just say a few things before we go forward: I misuse commas, a lot, and I won't be trying too hard to police that tendency in this blog so don't get annoyed by it. I cuss in writing too, but less than I used too and normally only for emphasis. And I like to use block paragraphs and to start sentences with conjunctions. Also I really like to eat meat, which I guess is a thing people care about these days or something.

Oh and I'm from southern Louisiana, I used in live in Lake Charles but now I live in Baton Rouge.

Finally, if you're an actual real life friend of mine that has stumbled onto this blog (possibly through Facebook since I'm considering liking it there) please don't get too concerned about anything I'm saying here, it's mostly thoughtless rambling. If I'm really in trouble I promise I'll ask you (probably for money or something). If you're not an actual real life friend of mine but you know me in person then you should probably just walk on by because I might say mean things about you, or maybe not. In either case you should just ignore this and we'll both be happier.

Also if you're an employer please know this is not actually Andrew Stewart, I just hacked his google+ account and used his pictures to render myself anonymous.