Well, despite what my kids may think, it has gone relatively well this morning. No loud screaming, no fires, no wet pants, no blunt head trauma—what more can a body ask? Of course, they are bored absolutely to tears—it’s not necessarily the lack of stuff to do, it’s being corralled in my office. After the fifteenth time of looking at my wall o’ pictures and pacing the 16ft length by 12ft width of the room and rearranging my Design markers and playing with the electric eraser and riding the drafting stool up and down, it gets to be somewhat tedious. Hey kids, just wait until this becomes the way you decide would be a good way to make a living!

We just got back in from going to lunch, which was very nice. It is an absolutely gorgeous day today—the humidity’s low, mid-80s, light clouds, wind about five knots—so we went and got ourselves some of those good ol’ Sneaky Pete’s hotdogs and sat out in Linn Park. Sneaky Pete’s is a locally-owned chain, and are perennially voted as Birmingham’s best hot dogs (although there are some Pete’s Famous diners who would kill you as soon as hear you say that) and normally come with a big Zeigler weiner, kraut, onions, mustard, relish and Pete’s special sauce. Runny, spicy, and hard to beat. Unless you’ve got kids eating them in the park, in which case each bite is a nail-biting adventure in Preventative Sauce Discharge. Again, luck held and there were no untoward incidents.

It sure was a nice break. The kids don’t get a lot of exposure to city life, so a genteel meal on the grounds hopefully gave them a bit of a culturing up. We sat there and watched the squirrels hop and the pigeons bob along, listened to water splashing at the fountain and the carillon at the Cathedral Church of the Advent play “Ode to Joy,” watched a fire truck and rescue unit answer a call. We ate, and I looked around at all the huge old oaks, which are pushing 130 years old or so, and at the bright sky and the neatly trimmed grass and the tall buildings. I have traveled around enough to know the combined effect of all this is the hard-to-capture concept of urbanity. It is the distilled goodness of life in a city and it is heady and intoxicating when it finds you. I hated having to go back inside. But here I am.

I wanted to say thanks to Eve Tushnet—she always has nice things to say about my pointless meanderings herein. She mentioned Possumblog in a post yesterday in which she reviewed her participation in a panel discussion of blogging on Wednesday.

The final nifty characteristic of blogs that I discussed was the personal nature of the writing. Now, this can be either a bug or a feature. It is just creepy to detail every moment of your life, or worse yet, to air your dirty laundry in public--who is reading your site? Why are you writing it? I think last night I sounded more critical of personal-life blogs than I really am--when they're funny, their appeal is pretty much the same as Dave Barry's. Tepper runs a very cool blog that oscillates between personal and political/legal; the Possumblog is a durned good time. But there are some blogs that really do suffer from exhibitionism, and that's lame.

But when it's presented with a little more care for one's own privacy, the personal aspects of blogging can help other people really understand your philosophy--the underlying worldview that unites your stances on, say, gun control, Bruce Springsteen, and race relations in Milwaukee. Blogs help show that politics isn't--or shouldn't be--some disconnected policy preferences; political beliefs should flow from underlying ethical and ultimately metaphysical beliefs that you live with all day long. (Or try to, anyway.)

That also makes it easier for others to be persuaded--we can imagine what it would be like to live all day as a leftist, a conservative, a pro-lifer, an Objectivist, and we can see that it needn't make us lousy people. So much of contemporary politics is about personal preferences and affiliations--were the leftists you knew condescending? Were the conservatives rich bigots? Who do you want to hang out with--a Gore voter, a Bush voter, or a Nader voter? Blogs show that there are leftists/conservatives/whatever who don't fit your stereotypes--there are people who are kind of like what you might be like if you were a leftist/conservative/whatever. And seeing people who you might want to be like can help you evaluate their beliefs without worrying that if you start agreeing with them you'll turn into a jerk.

Just as Plato wrote dramatic and biographical accounts of Socrates, rather than simply presenting Socrates' arguments, blogs persuade by showing a whole life. At their best, blogs are an act of life as rhetoric.

For my part, I do this because I like to write. I tend to write about personal happenings because I have been either been blessed with a life full of funny stuff or I see what happens and it strikes me as humorous. I don’t tell all; I tell you the things I tell My Friend Jeff, or the people I work with or go to church with. Even though you do get to hear a lot about icky biological stuff, I do have my standards. You will never mistake Possumblog for Penthouse Forum. Or Oprah. (But maybe Guns and Ammo.)

When I started out doing this, I was inspired by some links I found on Lileks’ site. I was overwhelmed with the quality of writers out there; good, insightful, witty, intelligent, grammatically sound, refusing to use “i” and more or less committed to spelling as found in the dictionary—the antithesis of the Usenet and bulletin board communities. I wanted to play, too, so I started this blog.

I have never fancied myself as a journalist or a reporter except in the generic sense of a person who reports on what is going on around him and keeps it written down. I comment on things I find interesting or infuriating or thought-provoking or idiotic. Why? Why not.

One thing I have tried to do is present my views in such a way that even though you may not agree with me, you at least will have a little respect for me or some insight about why I believe as I do. And one thing I’ve tried to do is simultaneously have fun with all the silliness that comes from being a person from Alabama and also silence a few of the lovers of “diversity” and “harmony” and “cultural sensitivity” who have no problem excluding, marginalizing, or demeaning me simply because I was born here and just happen to love it more than any other place I’ve ever been.

I have also tried to make people understand that just because I do not live in Jerusalem or Mexico City or Prague, does not mean that I am unaware of the world around me or that what happens in those places is of no consequence to me. I know of at least one “educated” person who has visited from time to time who thinks it’s silly to be so concerned about Palestinian anarchists or other such twaddle, because ::sniff:: that’s just so remote from my everyday life, even if I were the most educated person in the state. Nice words from someone whom I’m sure fancies himself as worldly and well-educated and is, in fact, responsible for instructing tender young college students. If you get right down to it, anything outside of about a 30 mile radius of my butt in this chair is pretty remote. But relevance and linear distance are two different things. Lots of things are far away, but some of them have a very uncomfortable way of quickly closing the gap. I would be much more comfortable if they did not exist at all. Such as the aforementioned Islamorons. So, like it or not, I express my thoughts about them.

I also realize that my opinions aren’t necessarily anything that anyone other than me cares about. So, there is a strong dose of self-deprecation in what I put down here. Sort of a take off on the beam/mote thing.

That’s why I do whatever it is I’m doing right now.
posted by Terry at 3:02:00 PM