What is it with this blogging thing? This is a question I ask myself all the time. I’m not even sure why I do it. I read other blogs. Most of them seem to have some sense of purpose. I have none. I’d like to say I’m just doing it for me. But if that was true, wouldn’t I just jot my thoughts down in Word and save them to the hard drive. Or, Hell, I could by a journal and write (with a pen!) my thoughts in there. OK, maybe not that. But I don’t do that. I put it out here. For you to read. That seems to be an important part of it. I don’t whore, as some you some ineloquently put it, my blog out. I have given up on tricks to gain more readership. They don’t give me more readership, they give me more hits. Yet, I have gained a tiny little following.

That blows my mind. The fact that there are a handful of you out there who are interested in what I have to say is awesome. I used to be sad that I didn’t get more comments, but I realize now that people are much more likely to comment if I post silly shit, than on the kinds of stuff I post here. Recently, I have been experiencing, for lack of a better word, some writers block. This strikes me as very funny. Unlike a lot of my fellow bloggers I do not consider myself a writer. Just sitting here getting these words out of my head and into the computer is very hard for me. Before I started blogging, I hadn’t written much of anything that wasn’t mandatory for some class. My freshmen English class had us type our work in to some computer. The computer evaluated our writing level. It told me I had a fifth grade writing level. My professor told not to sweat it because the computer would give Hemingway a third grade level. That made me feel better until I read The Old Man and Sea.

The problem is I’m still not sure why I am doing this. I think it irks my wife some. I probably spend a bit too much of my free time working on this and reading other blogs. Yet, I’m at a loss to explain it. Some of it come from the fact that you are reading this. It doesn’t matter who you are. It just matters that you are reading. Why? Because, it keeps me honest. It keeps me on my toes. If I went off on some bullshit tangent or made some absurd assertion you might leave a comment and call me on it. It doesn’t even matter whether or not you would really leave that comment, the fact that you could keeps me from kidding myself. I don’t write to attract traffic, nor do I allow whether you will like what I’m going to post about influence whether I post about it. That’s a good thing, because every time I write about backpacking the tumbleweeds roll on by.

The other part of it is the community. And that weird because I hate that kind of stuff. But it works here, in the blogoshpere. I read your blog because I like it. If I don’t like I won’t read it. If it stops being interesting, I’ll stop reading. Occasionally, things get a little clique-ish, but it passes. There is no central forum, no home. It is distributed and democratic. This is good.

Yet, I do not have any idea why I do this. I can tell you in detail why I like to backpack, why I like football, why I am a Democrat, why I think Lord of the Rings is awesome. But I cannot even begin to articulate why I blog.