I'd Rather Stick Anchovies In My Ears.

And…I have a blog. I have a blog? See, I didn’t want one, exactly, but then I do enjoy the writing, and every book I read about the writing (which I hate doing, by the way, because how much how-to can you take before you’re just putting off doing the thing, yourself?) tells me to keep a journal, and, well, I hate journals. (No offense to Doug Funnie. Or Anne Frank. You both rock in your own extremely dissimilar ways.) Because, here’s the thing with journals - you sit there with your big, blank marble notebook, or one of those – ugh – leather-bound deals with the ribbon-for-a-bookmark thing, and suddenly, it’s like you have to put something Important down, which leads to all kinds of over-thinking, which leads to uncalled-for self-pity, which leads to overly-dramatic accounts of, like, your trip to the supermarket the other day (“They had these new honey-barbeque potato chips. And I felt so…alone.”) And none of it sounds like you at all, and you end up finding it in a box in five years, wondering, “Who is this unhappy boy and why is he using so many Thesaurus words?”

So anyway, I was like, fine, Books, I’ll sit here and start a kind-of-journal as long as you promise to shut up about “the canvas of my mind” or whatever. Which they didn’t. So I burned them. And then I gave in and made a blog, just like all the cool kids are doing these days (at least, that’s what some old guy on the news told me, about six months ago – “short for ‘web-log,’ blog fever is sweeping the nation - just like custodians, but trendier!”)

And besides, not doing something just because everyone else is doing it almost as bad as doing something because everyone else is doing it (unless that thing is, like, drugs – because, if I remember my Saturday morning public-service-announcements correctly, drugs make you mean to everybody, like a monster!) (And, great, three paragraphs in and I’m already making less sense than a typical episode of Supernatural. Which makes. No. Sense.) And besides besides, I know you were looking for something else to pretend to care about. And besides all that, even - at least it’s not a podcast (“Welcome to this week’s installment of Omigosh, Do I Really Sound Like That??”).

Right, so, we’ll see how this goes. Maybe I'll always write this much. Maybe sometimes I'll write less, and you could actually move on with your day. Maybe I’ll become a world-wide-phenomenon, with people flocking from all over to see what I ate for dinner last night or how I feel about that stupid Wal-Mart commercial where the woman is decorating her place for Christmas, and then we zoom out to see she’s in a mobile home that’s going around what looks like a bit of a sharp turn, and I’m like, lady, you just lit candles in there, that doesn’t seem too smart! And then you'll comment, like, "Nobody knows what's happening when you talk, Matt."

All I know is, if I ever start up with that “I hate my life, now sit back as I express my pain through this Dashboard Confessional lyric and a haiku about my cat” business, I grant you full permission to come to my house and kick me. Hard.