How I Got Into Blogging

One afternoon, in the summer of 2006, I was hanging out at movie critic Harry Knowles' website Aint It Cool News. I'd been a faithful fan of his since the dawn of the millenium.



In one of his postings, he mentioned that his thoughts could also be found at a place called MySpace. Curious, I headed over there, but was a tad disheartened when I read that one must be a member in order to go to other members' sites (This may not be the case any longer).

Wanting to check HisSpace out, I answered a few questions and created MyOwnSpace (alright, I'll stop with the puns). Once a member, I read some of his material which was interesting, but certainly not earth-shaking. I then toyed with the thought of getting some mileage out of my own account, so posted some random thoughts on one of my favorite subjects, movies; in this particular instance, films that were being released that summer (you can read it here).

A day later, I wrote eight sentences about the wonders of the Sonicare toothbrush. I started a regular series in which I discussed my favorite movie of every year, starting with 1980. About a month later, I logged onto MySpace to post another probably movie-related entry and was surprised to find that my content had apparently been erased. Yikes! A few hours later, it was back, but a bit frightened by what had happened, I decided to migrate to a forum more conducive to blogging. Blogger.com more than fit the bill and I've been there ever since. My writing has certainly evolved over the years; I shudder at times to read some of my early posts.

One of the first entries to really make me aware of the therapeutic nature of writing and being able to share it with the world was called "Rollingstone", an account of a trip I took in the early aughts to the grade school I attended as a child (for the full entry, click here). Below are a couple of my favorite sections of it; the first dealing in humor, the second in pathos, two components which I continue to rely upon as we approach the halfway point of 2010.

"I walked into the old gym where I used to play M*A*S*H (dodgeball) and eat lunch from my "Empire Strikes Back" lunchbox. It was the damnest thing. The whole building seemed smaller to me. The school had shrunk over the past two decades. Yeah, right. Of course this was because when I attended the school, I was a bit shorter. Now having grown to my full height, everything seemed smaller when, in fact, it was me that had gotten bigger (in more ways than one, well, not really)."

"I headed back down the steps and left the building, a building where I had spent so many hours of my formative years. I took one last look, wistfully recalling those days that seem like a lifetime ago. I got into my car and headed back to my life in Rochester, a life that I quite enjoy, but please excuse me if sometimes I wish I could go back to where it all began, when everything was new, and happiness was going to follow me for the rest of my days."