Day the first

Well, myspace was fun while it lasted, and my obsession with facebook is drawing to its inevitable close. I only go there for the Scrabble now, that and a 3000-plus message thread I have going with some friends which is surely bound for the Guinness Book. Really though, I don’t understand the dozens of groups where everybody joins but nobody does or says anything. It’s all just endless affiliation. I’ve decided instead that I’d rather know a lot about a very few people than a little bit about 120 people, so I’ve been hunting for interesting blogs of late. I’ve settled on a handful that I seem to enjoy. This one, of course, I love. Two belong to nuns (make of that what you will), one is an American art professor, one is a gay guy in London. I like to read about his sexual conquests written in formal / online directory / school newspaper style (‘I’ll definitely go there again …‘, ‘A good time was had by all …’)

My favourite though is this lovely journal by a wonderfully funny and erudite man, member of Readers Wifes, part of the Duckie collective and culture junkie extraordinaire. I saw Readers Wifes play an aeon and a half ago at Homoelectric in the halcyon days of electroclash and they were fierce indeed. His blog makes me laugh out loud which is more than I can say for anything I’ve read in print of late. I’m tempted to re-read A Confederacy of Dunces just to remind myself it’s possible. This, however, is forbidden for reasons I’ll come to later.

For now, I realise some basic info is customary but rather than do one more tired online ‘profile’ (I think I’ve had five already) I’ll mostly just write this thing and let information surface that way, that’s much more interesting to read I always think. That said, I am thirty, I live in Manchester, this is my twelfth year in the city, I am, like lots of people I know, doing one thing (working) and aspiring to do another (writing). This blog is in part to help me flex my writing muscle without impinging too much on what I’m ‘really’ writing, which is fiction. One day though, when I am published and they are teaching a course on my writing, scholars can come to this blog and dig up my little ingots of wisdom, or else criticise my syntax.

Let’s see what the blogging future holds. It’s goodbye for now, The Simpsons is about to begin. Join me in praying it won’t be the ‘Bleeding Gums Murphy’ episode again … Oh it’s ‘The Telltale Head’, I’m sure this was on just last week … Sigh. Well, goodbye for now.