This Blog’s History

This blog began, as all suspicious enterprises should, in transit: somewhere between Los Angeles and Fiji, with the Pacific spread below like a blue argument for optimism and me, naturally, preparing to mishandle it.

Fiji was beautiful in the way postcards are beautiful before human beings arrive to complicate them. The light behaved itself. The sea looked as if it had been recently polished by a committee of angels. Even the air seemed to have confidence. I wrote a few pieces there, or nearly there, and for a brief dangerous moment I thought the thing might have momentum. I had started a blog. It had a shape. It had a name. It had that faint electric smell of a future not yet spoiled by logistics.

Kava, however, was another matter. Kava tasted like the earth had been made into a beverage by someone with deep respect for mud. I could see the cultural gravity of it, the ritual, the hospitality, the seriousness of the bowl. But my tongue, that vulgar little clerk, filed a complaint. It was not for me. Still, I drank enough of the place to feel I had done my duty, wrote a few good posts, and thought, with the kind of confidence usually found in people about to make travel decisions without adequate mental supervision: why stop now?

So I went to New Zealand.

There I discovered a second principle of blogging, less often mentioned in the manuals: a good view goes alarmingly well with a drink. A mountain, a lake, a sky behaving extravagantly—these things can persuade a disillusioned man that beer is not a beverage but an interpretive framework. And if the man is already going slightly mad, and if Ambien is somewhere in the machinery, then alcohol does not merely pack a punch. It arrives wearing brass knuckles and a municipal uniform.

I drank. Not elegantly. Not like a literary exile in a linen suit, but like a man trying to dissolve a private weather system. Then travel became less a plan than a sequence of airport-shaped events. The map turned into a fever chart. I moved through places with the vague determination of luggage that had begun to suspect it was traveling alone. Eventually I found myself in Abu Dhabi, that great polished injunction against chaos, and there I told myself the thing all drifting men tell themselves when they briefly spot their own reflection in a hotel mirror.

Suvro, focus.

Get back to the blog.

This was sound advice, which naturally made it very easy to ignore. I was still busy working on dreams that were not mine, which is one of the more refined forms of modern foolishness. You lend your imagination to other people’s machinery, oil their ambitions with your remaining enthusiasm, and call the resulting exhaustion experience. It is experience, I suppose, in the way falling into a ditch is geography.

Then came Dubai.

Dubai is not a city so much as a declaration that gravity is optional if the invoice clears. Glass, height, money, perfume, malls large enough to contain a minor European principality, and everywhere the vague suggestion that life is something one purchases by the square foot. And there, in this cathedral of consumption, I found myself buying second-hand books.

This was not the approved activity.

People looked at me as if I had entered a Formula One race riding a goat. The stall was small, almost apologetic, wedged into a city committed to the belief that everything should shine, rise, rotate, or cost too much. I loved it instantly. There is something beautifully perverse about buying old books in Dubai. Around you, people are buying watches, handbags, perfumes, promises, apartment brochures, and desserts engineered like minor architecture. You are standing there holding a used paperback with a cracked spine, feeling like the last monk after the accountants have bought the monastery.

That, too, belongs to this blog’s history.

The blog has never been merely a website to me. It has been a container for a disorderly private republic: sketches, essays, technical thoughts, jokes with broken teeth, failed attempts at seriousness, successful attempts at irritation, the occasional sentence that surprised even me by surviving the fall from brain to page. It is where I try to gather the loose bolts of myself before they roll under the furniture forever.

For a long time I could not make it turn out the way I wanted. The thing was always almost right. Almost. The design needed work. The writing needed arrangement. The categories looked like they had been assigned during a minor seizure. The technical parts kept sulking. The personal pieces kept arriving with mud on their shoes. But lately, for the first time, I think it is coming closer to the shape I had in mind—not perfect, certainly, but coherent enough to stop apologizing for its own existence.

Once that happens, the next problem begins.

Getting people to read.

Here is where romance dies and invoices begin. In the old fantasy, one writes something worthwhile, releases it into the world, and readers, alerted perhaps by migratory instinct, arrive. They gather. They subscribe. They recommend. They become a small intelligent crowd. This is a charming belief, like thinking a pigeon respects architecture.

The modern internet does not work that way. Attention is not found. It is bought, gamed, bribed, harvested, algorithmically courted, or acquired through the ancient human arts of networking, flattery, luck, spectacle, and shameless repetition. You need money for marketing, money for promotion, money for design, money for distribution, money for expert advice, money to avoid the expert advice of frauds, and then more money to discover that even the non-frauds are mostly selling weather forecasts in a room without windows.

I do not have that money.

This is inconvenient because money, in our delicate civilization, has become the grease for nearly every hinge. Even sincerity now needs a launch budget. A man may have thoughts, a laptop, a domain name, a backlog of essays, and the willingness to sit alone in a room interrogating his own disappointments until they confess; but without promotion, he is essentially whispering into a locked cupboard.

Books have suffered a similar fate. People still buy them, of course. They buy them beautifully. They buy hardcover editions in dignified colors and arrange them behind sofas or beside ceramic objects of mysterious purpose. Books have become domestic plumage. A shelf says: I am the sort of person who might read this, which is, socially speaking, often enough. The unread book now occupies a refined emotional distance. It is not knowledge. It is potential knowledge, preserved like jam.

The dopamine lives in the distance.

Owning the book suggests a future self, and the future self is always so much more disciplined than the current slob. The future self reads Spinoza at dawn, stretches, drinks water, organizes receipts, and understands geopolitics. The present self buys the book, places it near a lamp, photographs it, and returns to a screen where a dancing stranger explains productivity in forty-seven seconds.

Blogs face the same problem, only worse. A book, even unread, can decorate a room. A blog must be opened. It must be clicked. It must compete with scandal, cricket, catastrophe, recipes, pornography, investment advice, celebrity dentistry, outrage, and videos of animals demonstrating superior moral character. An obscure blog behind an obscure address is not merely unread. It is almost metaphysically absent.

Content, we are told, matters.

Of course it does. Eventually. In the way nutrition matters after one has already acquired food. But first comes visibility. First comes trust by association. First comes the awful little social proof machine. If you are known, content is inspected. If you are unknown, content is buried, not necessarily because it is bad, but because nobody has been given a reason to risk attention on it. Attention is expensive now. People guard it badly but spend it nervously.

And then there is the human problem.

When I had money, I had friends. Many friends. A festive little troop of facial muscles and exposed teeth. They smiled with athletic commitment. They nodded at my plans. They predicted, with the generosity of people who lose nothing by being wrong, that my imagined blog would be a sensation. Viral, they said, because every age has its holy word and ours is viral, a term borrowed from disease and applied to success, which tells you nearly everything about the century.

Then the rough patch came.

The admirers evaporated. The smiles were recalled. The teeth remained, but now they were arranged differently. The masks came off, and beneath them were other masks, sterner ones, the kind people wear not against viruses but against obligation. This is one of the hard little discoveries of adulthood: people do not always leave dramatically. Sometimes they simply reduce your resolution until you are no longer visible.

There is a hierarchy in every room, even when nobody admits it. Money brightens your outline. Failure dims it. When you are useful, people find you fascinating. When you are inconvenient, you become philosophical background noise. The same person who once called your idea brilliant will later behave as if your email contains a mild infection.

I do not say this with innocence. I have worn masks too. We all have. Civilization is, among other things, a mask exchange program. But there is a special education in watching warmth become calculation. It teaches you what applause is worth before the invoice is paid. It teaches you how quickly affection discovers scheduling conflicts. It teaches you that some friendships were never friendships at all, merely weather systems produced by your apparent prospects.

Still, the blog remains.

That is the ridiculous part. The tiny noble part too, perhaps, though I distrust noble explanations. I keep writing. I keep sketching. I keep adjusting the machinery. I keep trying to make the place legible without sanding off the splinters. I keep thinking that if I cannot market it properly to my contemporaries, those distinguished addicts of schadenfreude, perhaps I can at least leave it properly arranged for posterity, that imaginary reader with better manners and no immediate demand for proof of status.

Posterity is a useful fiction. It does not interrupt. It does not ask whether the piece has been monetized. It does not say, “Very nice, very nice,” while backing toward the exit. Posterity is the reader one invents when the present has gone shopping.

But I am not giving up.

Not because perseverance is beautiful. It often is not. Perseverance is frequently just stubbornness after a bath. But I have learned a few things, viscerally and vicariously, and one of them is that wanting something does not excuse you from the ungainly labor of pursuing it. You fight for the thing, not in a cinematic way, not with swelling music, but by returning to the desk, fixing the broken page, rewriting the bad paragraph, asking one more person to read, enduring one more silence, and resisting the urge to mistake obscurity for verdict.

My strategy, then, is modest and deranged.

I will keep writing. I will keep sketching. I will keep performing the minimum viable networking required to prevent the blog from becoming a sealed archaeological chamber. I will occasionally ask people to read a post, thereby assigning them a nonremunerated chore they did not request and will almost certainly resent. I will irritate selectively. Irritation, properly applied, is underrated. It is the poor man’s marketing department.

At some point, perhaps, someone will read to preserve their sanity. Someone will forward a link out of pity, curiosity, boredom, revenge, or mistaken identity. Someone may know someone who knows someone with the mysterious ability to convert effort into audience. A bona fide person may appear. A door may open. Or not.

Either way, this blog has already done something useful. It has followed me from Fiji’s earthy bowl to New Zealand’s dangerous scenery, from Abu Dhabi’s polished self-corrections to Dubai’s second-hand books, from the company of smiling apes to the quieter company of sentences. It has survived my own inattention, which is no small achievement. It has remained, even when I have not always known how to remain.

That is the history so far: a man, a blog, several airports, insufficient money, too many vanished friends, a stack of books, a cracked ambition, and the stubborn belief that if one cannot become famous, rich, loved, or properly marketed, one can at least become difficult to ignore.

And if that fails, one can become irritating.

There are worse literary strategies.