//post one\\ or "why bear blog? why now? ...what?"
i think mostly i wanted to start fresh. a lot of us do this, sometimes. it's like putting on new clothes, driving a different car. getting a hair cut. a new tattoo. moving to a new city. and so on.
i used to be on substack. and i guess i still am. i was excited about it when i first started. It had a clean, simple interface and reading on it seemed a bit more elegant than anything else i had known at the time. but after a few years it's becoming more than that. it feels bloated and cluttered, like walking through a crowded and dusty market in the hot desert, and every vendor you run into is trying to sell you sone shit you don't want.
I am a paid subscriber to a few different authors (Ted Gioia, Chuck Palahniuk, Junot Diaz, Michael Easter, George Saunders, Chris Ryan) and for their platforms they do good work. but for people like me, who are just sharing their thoughts without any particular purpose or intent, not trying to build a following, i think it mostly doesn't matter.
like a lot of us in today's world, my brain is cluttered. common writing marketing advice is to niche down. but i don't give a shit about niching down. not here. I want to write about whatever I feel like, about all the things.
that's why i am here.
the exploratory nature of writing in blog format invites us to be messy. that's how i like it. as steinbeck wrote in East of Eden, "and now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good". this is what I am doing here. share some thought or observation, and move on.
so here and now upon your internet walkabout, think of this place like a cool rock you see, one that sits next to that weird looking tree. you know the one. and on subsequent walkabouts i want you to continue to enjoy seeing that rock. maybe you can think, that's a cool rock, i'll go see what it's about. maybe there's a frog underneath or a worm.