Rod Torkelson's Armada Featuring Herman Menderchuk

I think it's weird that, even after having been a blogger for the better part of three years, I am, for the most part, right where I was when I started the first one:

I have no idea what a blog is.

In the interim between the then and the now, I have not, to the best of my recollection, suffered any kind of blunt head trauma, so yes, I do get the basic idea of instant publication of one's thoughts.

The question I am failing not only to answer, but even begin to formulate, at this point is the why. Now that we as a net-faring people have outgrown the wormwood cocktail of technology shaken with navel gazing, served in a frosted novelty tumbler, what do these things really do anymore? As the medium strains through becoming and finds a method of Being in a grown-up world, have those of us, the dinosaurs who have nothing of real note to say but the capacity to say it in thousands of useless words, been evolved right out of our niche?

And if I can't figure out what to ask, what am I even doing here?

Well, I've spent the last twenty minutes trying to work in the punny adage "absinthe makes the heart grow fonder," so I guess some of the old zeitgeist still moves the extremeties.

In 2004, when I started my last one, a blog was a method of projecting a communal presence. But that function has been usurped--and was, we see now, in the process even then of being usurped--by your MySpaces and your Facebooks. And those work better, because let's face it, if you want to be somebody on MySpace, you don't even need to have anything to say. All you need is a favorite band and a poorly lit digital picture of yourself and blammo, Tom's your Friend.

But now blogs aren't just the backwater for people with Quenya-language poetry by people with elf names or for your local band of Knitters for Jesus to note the last general meeting's minutes. Reputable people with reputable (read: funded) organizations with not only spell-checkers, but content editors and directed demographics use these things as a first-line roll-out platform, on the same plane as the teevee, for everything from the dissemination of political ideas to the sale of energy drinks.

I turn my back for one measly year and blogs turn into serious business.

So what am I doing here?

The short answer is: I'm writing.

It's been a long fucking year, people. Too long. I miss typing adjectives like "fucking," for one thing.

Many things are different. For instance, I used to be "Pops." That used to be funny and appropriate. But now the sole animating impulse that drove me--being a dad--no longer, in and of itself, satisfies. Now I'm one of those career people, with cubicles and bosses and commutes, where the kids are less all-consuming atom-smashing stars, directing both my arc and spin, and are now more squares on the calendar; that which I will get to when other things allow.

So maybe that's appropriate. I don't have a catchy handle yet. I don't know what this will be or when/if I'll be able to keep trying it. But maybe that just means as the medium changes, I just happen to be, completely by accident, keeping pace.