So if blogging is a habit, and I haven’t blogged regularly for god knows how long mainly because I’ve lost the habit, then perhaps the way to start again is to just post something every day no matter what even if it sucks for thirty days. (Which is, I believe, is how long it’s commonly thought to take habits to crystalize.)
Let’s find out.
Some days you’re the dog; other days, you’re the hydrant.
Which is to say, while updating MovableType, the software that runs this blog, I somehow managed to blow the brains out of both self-aggrandizement.com and CrossFit NYC’s highly trafficked blog.
Fortunately, I back up the actual entry content for both. But not the design or code, which I’ve spent much of today rebuilding from scratch.
So, in short, if you see anything strange on either site, please let me know.
My brain is shot to hell, and though I’ve spent the past thirty minutes trying to piece together a blog entry – something to do with emptying your inbox, and with diagnosing what causes work backlogs – I have nothing to show for it, aside from seven or eight abortive, fractional starts, collections of partial paragraphs and half-finished run-on sentences.
I’ll spare you those, but as I’m having a hard day, I at least wanted to point out I sure did try, in the hopes of earning some partial credit.
As Anne Lamott observed, the best cure for writer’s block is a shitty first draft. Convince yourself you don’t have to write something good – just that you have to write something – and it becomes far easier to get words flowing.
Which makes sense in the world of novels, where authors iterate months or years between first draft and final product. But not in blogs, where the time from idea to post sometimes spans just minutes.
In other words, good blogging requires good first drafts. Which puts the pressure back on a blogger with writer’s block. And as the length of time from one post to the next mounts, that pressure worsens. Drop posting frequency from near-daily to at-best-monthly (as I have of late), and each entry need be Pulitzer-worthy to justify itself.
Yet experience dictates that I blog best as habit – post regularly, day in and day out, and intermittently, excellence emerges.
So, for the balance of this year, it’s consistency over quality. In other words, I’ll be doing my best to accept shitty first drafts. And I hope you will, too.
“I’m always making a comeback but nobody ever tells me where I’ve been.” - Billie Holiday
And, now regretting my overuse of the formulation of that last post, other people whom this site has suggested ‘look out’:
Harvey Weinstein.
Picasso.
Bob Villa.
Santa Claus.
Movie people.
Playgirl.
Anyone who pisses me off.
Gawker linked to my recent post on holiday tipping, with the helpful comment:
Furthermore, you live in a building with six fucking doormen. You SHOULD tip those guys for keeping out the crazies. It’s not like you can’t afford it. Asshole.
To which I say, since when is the editorial staff of Gawker reading my blog?
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”
- Aristotle
Friends who read this site often ask: “what the hell is wrong with you?”
Or, more specifically, “why would you possibly want to post random details about yourself online?”
And, indeed, that’s a question I ocassionally ask myself as well. But, in stacking up the few reasons to self-aggrandize against the many sensible reasons to not, I inevitably remember that this site, more than anything else, is meant to shame me into regular writing.
Knowing that, somewhere out there in the ether, several thousands of you are inexplicably checking self-aggrandizement every day, I feel compelled to sit down and write something. Which, as every writing teacher I’ve ever had loved to remind, is more than half the battle, the writerly part of your brain, like a muscle, strengthening with exercise or atrophying from disuse.
So, as we careen towards January 1st, and I begin my standard obsessive process of taking stock of the year past and charting the one ahead, I’ve been considering the easily undervalued importance of doing things – like writing for this site – regularly, the power of habits in chipping away, day in and day out, at the things I most want out of life.
Still, I realize that some habits are more easily stuck to than others. Which leaves me glad that, if nothing else, I can probably retain at least one lauded by the Great Emancipator himself: getting rip-roaring drunk.
“I believe, if we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class. There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant and warm-blooded to fall into this vice.”
- Abraham Lincoln
Let us drink to that. And let us do so, like clockwork, each and every day.
