Becoming a Blogger

So I thought, I’ll begin a blog. A blog seems like a ramble through a forest that has no clear path. It doesn’t require tidying up as one goes along. One just ambles here and there, letting one’s solipsistic thoughts guide one – responsible to no one but oneself. And the dizzying thought that dozens, make that hundreds, no, thousands of unknown souls out there in the stratosphere, with nothing else to do, would be tuning in to your words – well, it was mind boggling. Especially for a writer of what is known as midlist books, who has little expectations of such highs. But then in this book market, even the works of Chekov and Dostoevsky might have been rejected because their authors were not deemed amusing enough to make it to Oprah or Charlie Rose.

Anyway, I was reading a review of Sarah Boxer’s new book Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web in the NYT Book Review, 3/23/08 – Easter no less.
The reviewer David Kamp complained that Boxer would have been more amusing if she had chosen more wild pieces, as her subtitle promised, by including some from the turn of the 21st century, or earlier, when blogs were not yet called blogs.

Which reminded me that I actually experienced such a blogless blog. My client was an adopted young man, a computer nerd –as genius was called in those days – who at each session brought in copy of the story of his life he was posting in serial fashion on the Internet. It was in the mid 1990s and it proved to be a diary of the childhood of an adopted boy, sadly misplaced in a home so chaotic that to describe it as dysfunctional would be kind. Out of the misery of that boy, he was making something amusing. Out of this autobiographical material, he was making something therapeutic. Out of his writing, he was making blog history.

I don’t know where he is now or what he is doing. Perhaps he is still blogging away at a new chapter in his life. I don’t know what I gave him, but he has given me the courage to begin this blog. But how does a blog begin? I know they seem endless as one scrolls down from the current one to the earlier ones, like reversing time, as Martin Amis did in his novel Time’s Arrow, where he begins with the death of a Nazi doctor and goes backward in his life until he is a baby. I’d like any new reader of my blog to begin at the beginning with this one, but I know that if they have the patience, if I keep writing, they will have to go through much verbiage to arrive where I started – here.