Yes I still have one.
I sort of don’t feel like continuing this site … or maybe I do because I instinctually want to express my trivial thoughts … but it’s just soothing my ego and has no real purpose … but maybe it doesn’t need a purpose and just the occasional good online conversation is enough.
What follows is a shitily (I just made that word up) written back and forth about whether or not this website should continue. Read it and decide for yourself if The Stormy Present is worth it:
This blog has been on hiatus since St Patrick’s Day. That’s because the day after St Patty’s my computer crashed beyond recovery and I, frustrated and impoverished, decided to fully embrace my long standing neo-luddite inclinations. In other words, I refused to buy a computer until the other week. And you know what; I enjoyed not having a computer. Without a computer I stopped reading blogs, checking the news sites I used to frequent, didn’t receive email alerts from organizations or any of that stuff. It was weird at first but I started to like not caring. I was as close to being disconnected from the world as I’ve ever been without having to leave the country or go camping; and I loved it.
Without the world, there was only me and my physically perceived existence. I didn’t give fuck all about politics or social ills because they absolutely didn’t affect my day to day life, and even if they did what am I going to do about it? Now maybe that’s a myopic way to stroll through life, but frankly I feel like there is something to it. I’ve had my computer back for over two weeks now and one would think that after 3 months without a computer I’d be full of thoughts and ideas for blog posts and that this website would be overflowing with stuff to read. Yet, until now, 2 weeks after plugging back into the modern world, this is the first thing I’m writing. And the subject of this return to writing is whether or not there is any point to continue writing.
What’s the point of this website? Honestly, I have no idea.
Back in ’05 I started The Stormy Present on blogspot because I was in grad school and felt (having watched the movie Finding Forester) that the best way to ensure that my writing abilities were sharp was to write every day. So I’d come home and knock out a quick post about Hegelian philosophy or something and nobody would read it except maybe Jeff. Then, after a week of learning about philosophers that I hated I guess I started writing about sports, politics, and society in general. All of a sudden Jeff actually enjoyed reading the blog and other people started coming around to read it. Suddenly the blog was more than just a practice court for my grad school writing duties. I felt like I had all these good or crazy ideas that I just needed to get out for the sake of intellectual catharsis. I stopped writing on the blogspot site so I could focus on my master’s dissertation and once I finished that pain in the ass and decompressed I restarted the damn think here at wordpress with an even larger scope. It was a lot of fun for a long time. Jim, Jeff, Brad, Todd, Dayrock, and Mao (the Chairman) all contributed with comments and articles and it was like an online conversation just as we’d intended; a group of friends talking like they were sitting around a fire drinking beer.
However, just as with campfire conversations, you eventually go to sleep. That’s what I did with the whole no computer thing. The problem is that when I woke up I realized that those brief highlights are just the frantic gasps of a drowning man. Yes, those posts that generated conversations were incredibly fun, but did they matter or did they just serve as a sort of opiate for people who are good willed enough to want to change things for the better and smart enough to know that they can’t? I mean isn’t that really the point of a blog; to assuage the egotistical idea that YOU have something all important to foist upon the world? I for one am certainly egotistical enough to think that the things I wrote should be heard by the world, otherwise I wouldn’t have posted them, but I’m also realistic enough to know that absolutely no one gives a shit what I have to say no matter how sure I am that my ideas are important. Ultimately I think the blogosphere is just a bunch of people yelling, desperate to be heard while nobody listens to them because they’re all too busy shouting their own ideas.
Before I start rambling too much let me just pose this question; why on Earth should this blog exist? Frankly it takes a lot of work on my part (article submissions from others would help, but even then I still have to come up with an idea and write it and then rewrite it so that it makes sense) and if it doesn’t really matter in the larger sense (ie we aren’t going to change anything with what we write and it isn’t as if this is going to somehow launch a writing career or something) then why do it?
The future is in your hands. Comment and tell me why this fucking matters and why I should come home after a long day working at Servepro, pulling up wet carpet, drywall, plywood, particle board, etc all while breathing in mold and then sit down at my computer to write something that’ll be read by 7 people and won’t serve any greater purpose?
(The title and first line are from a song on Neko Case’s latest cd Middle Cyclone, which is good but not as good as Fox Confessor Brings the Flood)
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