To blog, or not to blog?

I started thinking about this a few days ago, when I was messing around with the CSS of this site to make my Google Reader shares display nicely.  Well, I started thinking about it again, I guess.  I've thought about this many times.  Why don't I write on this site anymore?  This used to be such an important thing in my life, and now I have to force myself to even think about it most of the time.

One of the main reasons I don't write much anymore is that I'm afraid of what people who read it will think.  Not the random strangers, obviously, but the people who know me and read this, only some of whom I know about.  So it's become the most boring kind of blog...the kind that's updated infrequently with pictures from vacations, or sanitized updates about my personal life, scrubbed of names and salacious details.  And the knowledge that it's become so banal only paralyzes me further.  It's increasingly uninteresting because it's increasingly uninteresting.

That's not what I wanted this to be when I made it.  Well, I guess originally I just made this site so that I'd have a place to pretend I had a band and put the music that resulted from that fantasy.  But it evolved pretty immediately into a place that I regularly recorded actual thoughts.  It inspired me to learn some basic web programming.  Hell, it inspired me to create another site at which I could post more thematically specific things (I all-but-ignore that one too, now, but that's because I don't listen to enough cool music anymore).  This site used to bring me joy because it was a public (but still relatively private because honestly, who spends the time to read this stuff?) place to vent*.

When I go back and read some of that venting though, I'm embarrassed.  That's another thing that keeps me from posting more often.  An accumulated shame.  The fear that the next post might be one more than I'll read later and think was stupid.  And the knowledge that, as dumb as it is and as unlikely as it may be that anyone would stumble upon it years from now in a Google cache, I'm crafting an indelible persona for myself on the web that feels incrementally unlike my current self, despite sharing my name.  It's petrifying.  It's not like I don't have thoughts I'd like to post somewhere all the freaking time.  I just don't know that I want to post them here anymore.  I feel exposed.

This is unorganized rambling and it's a testament to my haziness today that I'm going to post it all, especially since there's no A-Ha! moment at the end where I decide to screw everyone and post every day about impolite things like love and politics.  I'm probably still not going to post any more often.  I've just been thinking a lot about it, is all.

Anyone else who does this sort of thing ever become similarly preoccupied?


*This post, by the way, is only meta-venting.

Nerdgasm.

I realize that the Cognoscenti of the web will scoff at my years-late acclaim, but I don't care. I've been using it forever, but recently Google Reader has become, without question, the most important webthing to me besides email. It's completely made redundant my Digg and del.icio.us accounts, become far more important than Facebook, and solidified my resistance to Twitter (which I still think is dumb). As the sharing features have become more and more robust, it has become a complete maelstrom of things I like but wouldn't have known about if not for my friends. It's a machine that gives me food pellets every time I press the button, and at the same time an echo chamber for all the things I find that I like, from awesome things to reasons-to-hate-the-GOP. And now, with a little javascript, I've added a constantly updated stream of my most recent shares to the sidebar of this very webpage, to make it easy to ignore not only the things that I take the time to type up myself, but also the things that I just plain agree with or think are funny. This is very exciting.

If you're super cool, you're already reading this blog with your Google Reader, in which case, I'm always looking for more sharebros. If you're not already using it, get on board son. This train is bound for glory.