why a blog?

As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.

- US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld

Let’s start with things we know. 

Firstly, I’m not a writer. More than ever, social media has exposed me to so many brilliant writers who can seriously, properly write. It’s fantastic, but I’m not them.

Secondly, everyone and their stupid horse has a blog. This might be less true now than it used to be with the rise of short-form social interactions—tweets, tiktoks and the like—but fuck me, everyone loves their own opinion and thinks you should too.

It probably won’t last, either. I haven’t got anything to say. And whatever I can fart out, someone else will have farted out far better, with far more grace and elan than I ever could. And with less swears too, no doubt. (CUNT!)

So why say anything at all? 

The obviously candidate is that algorithms like fresh content. Filling one of these in every so often is going to make my website look far more attractive to the voracious, mercurial web-crawlers of Google that we’re all busy making internet-eyes at.

There’s a mental health aspect too. Jimmying the lock on my mind palace and crowbarring something out into the world has its merits. (Mind palace is a stretch btw. It's more an addled bedsit. Crowbarring, on the other hand, is depressingly correct.) 

For the most part though, it’s because you’re here.

Maybe you’re curious. Maybe I owe you money. Maybe you’ve got questions about how one man can look like both George Clooney AND Brad Pitt at the same time. (Genetics.) 

Whatever the reason, I’m happy to feed that curiosity. The least I can give you is a badly written blog while we try put on a show and see what happens next.

So how’s it going to work?

For a start, it’s not going to be a big deal. I’m not going to sit down with my writer’s hat on, sipping absinthe and staring off into the middle distance. I tapped this out in the Notes app on my phone, in bed, because my legs hurt from a run I went on yesterday. This is about as sophisticated as it’s going to get.

It’ll probably be infrequent, and on whatever topic’s jumped into my brain. This is going to be a shoot-from-the-hip sort of thing, and won’t be cursed by planning or thematic structure. This isn’t the MCU. 

It’s not going to win any awards either, apart from the major, prestigious ones, which I’ll decline so I can appear enigmatic and above it all.

Hopefully though, it’ll be fun. It may even, occasionally (if you approach it with a degree of charity) border on insightful.

Worst-case scenario, it'll delay whatever’s next, which, given the state of the world, might not be a bad thing.

And although we don’t know that for sure, at least we know we don’t know it for sure. After all, we could not know that we don’t know it at all. And that would be terrible.

- Alex 🎨✌️