Oh no.

First posts should be informational right? I’m supposed to stumble through an introduction and get right down to what this blog is supposed to be. I’m supposed to acknowledge the world of blogging and pretend that I’m not starting this as the blogging craze goes into sharp decline.

Blogging going into decline? Yes, I say that because reading is going into decline. Writing too. At least in America it is going into decline. Which means few people will probably read this and then in a month, fewer. In countries where reading is on its way up, they are reading blogs like they are going out of style. Which they are…in America. But only in the middle part of North America between the two countries that are stealing all our jobs (Mexico, all the highly sought after competetive produce picking jobs from which none of our Harvard or Yale grads can seem to find work, and Canada, whose citizens waltz right across the border that nobody is threatening to fence and take every decent film role not already taken by an Australian).

I believe this is where I make an excuse that my grammar and spelling may be incorrect at times as I write. I may have a runon sentence or two that continue off into the inky blackness of no-punctuationdom, never to stop despite the fact that I will be embarassed later that I wrote such a thing and people will point out that it is, in fact, a runon sentence and that I didn’t even spell runon correctly and that the sentence will end clunkily with a redundant preposition here. I make no excuse here.

Our nation, as a whole, particularly in the periodical publishing industry, made a conscious decision to abandon copy editing in 2008. If you think I’m wrong, try, TRY to find an AP story on the web that doesn’t have a glaring error in it. That didn’t use to happen. There were people in charge of re-reading what the writers wrote, and then fixed it. When it did happen, back in “the day” the publication would print a news story about it: CORRECTION! Yesterday’s news included a story where the word “to” was used where the word “two” was supposed to be. We are refunding everyone’s subscription for the year, because of the egregious error. The once copy editor of this publication has been tarred, feathered and sent to another city to sully their written word. (I wrote that whole last bit about the correction story with the voice of Walter Winchell in my head, but he was wearing the unmistakable white suit of a full fledged Kentucky Colonel.) In the present day, we know now that the last copy editor was layed off in April of 2009, she reminded a publisher that not only did she still correct all the copy errors in the publication despite spell and grammar checking programs in the word processing software, but that he spelled “severance” incorrectly. None of the writers liked those copy editors anyway; knit picky jerks with their style book and spelling bee trophies.

If nobody else is going to proof the stuff that is paid for, I’m sure as hell not going to fuss over this free blog. I reckon if you can figure out what I’m sayin’ despite the flagarantly flaunted laws of letters, we’re going to be fine.

I’m also not going to ask you what to write about, at least not here. I plan to ask random guys at urinals, right after they start their stream about what to write. That way, I can get a forced, cornered answer and maybe a knuckle sandwich. The bottom line is: I write what I write. You read it or don’t.

You… who am I even talking too? There are so few people reading this that there was an echo on that last line. You don’t need to know my feelings and I don’t feel compelled to share them. Stuff about me will come up, and then you’ll get to keep that information in your special little memory box of crap you don’t care about.

By the way, I’m going to wrap up each of my posts with, “and that’s the Damm truth.”