Scrambling
If it’s not viciously apparent by the four-day siege of consecutive blogs, I’m trying to do this on a regular basis. The goal: 365 blogs in 2025. The rules: 1) write 365 blogs in 2025; 2) see the previous rule.
That’s it. No word counts, no writing prompts, no rusty shackles to chain me to music or any other subject — just writing something here in this blog every day. In the past year, I’ve put the hammer down on this site, filling it with rants about movies, music, sports or whatever lurid, unhinged topic springs to mind. I don’t remember when I threw my stake into the ground and claimed http://joedaly.net as my own, like some ragtag, bug-eyed settler all hopped up on dreams of Manifest Destiny and shady nineteenth century grabs. But I do recall that what I had envisioned as a place to hone my craft and perhaps build a plucky little community of like-minded fiends, instead proved to be a literary graveyard, a dry, sprawling plain of nothingness, with unclaimed terabytes of data lingering unused and unwanted while I dicked around on MySpace, then Facebook and then whatever tawdry dopamine induction app moved to the forefront of my idle time.
I commissioned a phenomenal web design, courtesy of the phenomenally-talented author, Patrick O’Neil who was, conveniently at the time, also a phenomenally-talented web designer. It looked badass, with a murderous crimson background, a hovering skull on the landing page with a fist clenching a pen as the logo — knuckles tattooed with my initials. But my wholesale lack of inspiration — nay, commitment — conspired to keep my readership at just under twelve, I’d guess. Fittingly, it had been completely bricked by hackers for months before I noticed.
Given this legacy of lethargy, to invest in a redesign wasn’t the wisest proposition, but I went for it and the first year panned out so similarly to the site’s original version that I nearly retired the domain.
Incidentally, whoever owns http://joedaly.com, hit me up. I’ve been trying to buy it from you for ages. I even hired a domain broker but you, my well-heeled and presumably well-named domain owner, have not replied to our emails. Holla!
Anyhoo, last year I committed to more writing and I’ll give myself some credit — I’ve done a decent job, using this as a laboratory of subject and style. Away from the meddling hands of editors, advertisers and commenters, I’m free to scream into my own abyss without the contamination of external opinions. Which, as I write this, is a delusion, I realize. Nobody writes wholly without any awareness of someone reading their work. Even the world’s moody, teenage diarists surely revel in fantasies of their deepest thoughts one day finding the adoring eyes of the world-at-large. Or perhaps their vitriolic entries one day finding the horrified eyes of their bitter enemies, who will be felled like towering redwoods upon finding out just how much the author actually loathed them.
Generally, however, my goal is to write whatever I want, unencumbered by the expectations of others. Which is why comments are disabled on the site. Positive or negative, feedback is something that I’ve learned to avoid, lest it come from an editor or colleague as part of the creative process. An editor once told me, “When you publish something online, some people will say that it’s great and some will say that it’s terrible and they’ll both be wrong.” Glib as hell but also true.
With that, I’ll bring this windy, directionless entry to an end. Day four: check.