“I read your blog …”

Why do those words make me feel creepy? My emotional attachment to blogging is hard to explain. Caoecethes Scribendi — the itch to write — is my primary motivation. Thirty years of professional writing, one bad unpublished novel, a nonfiction book still in print, magazines, newspapers — I figure I need to expend 500 words a day or go insane. Still, when someone remarks — “I read your blog” — for the first time in a long writing career I feel weird about it. There is definitely some exhibitionism involved in throwing words onto the Net, but I never approach blogging the way I approach other writing — with an ideal reader in mind or a high degree of perfectionism. Some people dig the maritime history stuff in the Chatfield Project, others like it when I turn goofy and take pictures of holes in my socks, others leap onto the pedantic discussions of metrics and community theory.

I dunno, it’s all a dog’s breakfast and that’s why I like it. No theme. No mission. Just me and the “Write Post” window on wordpress bloviating on whatever, whenever. It’s the fact that strangers are reading it that gets creepy. The fact that there’s no way to delete a bad statement, etc. Looking through the server logs is especially weird. Who at Raytheon is reading this? At Pfizer? I know my circle of buddies — the one’s who comment — but still, parsing through the logs reveals all sorts of mysteries.