One Year of Nuts & Bolts

I have Thivai Abhor to thank for this post. I am a sentimental soul and would have felt some affection for my blog a year after I had launched it, but to write about why I blog a year later? I would have kept those thoughts to myself.

Today, October 6, 2006, my blog feels like an unattended, weedy garden. A year ago, in my inaugural post I said, "I have an expectation of other bloggers that they post frequently. Otherwise, why bother? I do not think I will meet my own expectation, but who knows?" I have felt the pressure of my own expectation over the past year and even created goals for myself to post consecutively for seven days. Could I do it? Did I have it in me to write every day?

I met my self-imposed goal. Through that exercise I discovered that I most enjoy writing for my blog when I have something to say that has touched me. Writing for quantity felt false. It is a visceral feeling I have that drives me to write. I need to write. Some of my posts are banal chatter, but I think there is a place for that in a blog, especially Nuts & Bolts.

Lately, I write for my blog because I miss the mental calisthenics only writing gives me. Writing takes me into a maze of doorways and passages that I don't or can't enter performing any other activity.

I write my blog as if I had my own column at the Los Angeles Times. I try to be fair, decent and me. I enjoy controlling what I will write about and how I will present it visually. The journalistic blog that I write is ultimately a one way conversation where anyone with an internet browser is invited to read and comment. I have little expectation that people will read and comment, but it is much more fun and enlightening when they do.

I only semi-regret one post in the last year. I let the post stand as-is and didn't delete it. I didn't like the 3D feedback I received about it, but interestingly, it had nothing to do with me or my 3D world. It was the one about getting a hymen-tuck for your mister.

Ironically, hymen-tuck is the one search subject that has brought the second to the most visitors to Nuts & Bolts. The biggest search subject is growing tomatoes in hay bales. I can't tell you how relieved I am that there is more interest in hay bale gardening than hymen-tucking!

Why do I blog instead of fill up a spiral note book? Because it is the first medium where I have creative control over the schedule, content and presentation of my writing. It is a the first medim that connects me with people I would otherwise not interact with. It is a reciprocal medium that a magazine can never be. Comments are posted and dialogue ensues. Or not. Until the next post.