Looking Back...
Soooooo.... hi.
It's been awhile, hasn't it? Almost six months to the day. Damn. What have you all been doing without me?
I'll tell you what I've been doing: Ignoring this blog. I wish I could say I did it on accident. That life got too busy for me and that I just couldn't keep up with it anymore. I guess in a way that's true. But I always had time to write.
I just didn't want to. The news stories became more and more depressing and outrageous. So outrageous, in fact, I didn't think I needed to give my two cents to most stories - they were ludicrous enough as it was.
I tried to tune politics out for awhile. With a do-nothing Congress and what unfortunately appears to now be a do-nothing president, nothing even really seemed interesting to write about. The Keystone Pipeline? It'll probably get built. The NSA Scandal? Tell me something I didn't already assume was happening. The Boston Bombing? A tragedy that I had no business writing anything sarcastic about.
I gotta tell ya, I was pretty close to deleting this whole site from the internet altogether.
But then I remembered something. I remembered why I started writing this back in November of 2010.
You see, I have near crippling anxiety with a lovely dash of depression. Mix those things with a hatred of confrontation, and you got yourself a Me. I'm never one to lash out at people. Shit, I don't even like being rude to people that were first rude to me. But this site gave me that opportunity.
For the first time in my life, I was able to lash out at things and people that deserved it in a relatively public forum. And it's not the anonymity that I like, but the fact that I get to think out my arguments and write them down in a manner to which I find to be quite funny.
That's how this site started, see? As a way for me to just unwind, share my worldview with anyone that wanted to read it, and to make people laugh. If you go back to my first posts, only a handful of them were political. A lot of them were fairly nonsensical. I made a list of movies that I hated. I wrote about how everything should be wireless these days. I made Michael Bay my bitch.
Now, I'm not saying that the shift to politics was unintentional, or even that I'm regretting it. It wasn't, and I don't. But reminding myself of the core reasons as to why I was wrote these posts inspired me to go back through and look at some of them and notice/remember a few things.
My original intention for this blog was to create a character that I would write in, much like Stephen Colbert has a character named Stephen Colbert that he does on his show every Monday-Thursday night. This character would be funny, a bit mean, vulgar, sarcastic, and informative. He would come out in my posts, and to strike down trolls in the comments section. He would be put away when responding to kind comments, or when writing about serious subjects.
I think I managed this quite well. Truthfully, I didn't have to work very hard. That character
is me, to a degree, although I like to think of him as a more hyperbolic me.
Then I set to work coming up with a schtick. A lot of people might notice that my earlier posts have lots of captioned pictures. I was very fond of that.
After that, came the content. What the fuck was I going to write about? That was how the name came about. "A Sane Break From The Insanity." I immediately loved it. It was my first and only choice. Here you were, reading my blog and getting your sanity break from the surrounding insane world, and there I was, enjoying myself and taking pleasure in the fact that somewhere, someone was smiling or laughing because of something I wrote.
The problem started when I wanted more. I wanted to be viewed by more. I wanted my site to gain in popularity until I was the next Oatmeal. So I started trying to write for others. Best of the Blogs and Addicting Info are the big ones that come to mind. And while I had a lot of control over what I wrote at both sites, neither site fully accepted the style in which I wrote. They wanted more journalism and less opinion so I, in my quest for recognition, reconfigured my style to suit them.
I took out those pictures with the funny captions and stuck with just one picture for an "article grabber." I took out the humor and added in more references and charts and boring graphics. My articles went from being entertaining and informative to just being informative with random swearing. That swearing, by the way, was the character I had come up with being smothered. He could manage to get a few words out here and there, peppered into the post like a vulgar spice, but they were never pretty.
It was for these reasons (and several other more personal ones) that I stopped writing in February.
Well, folks, I've realized something. Being the King of Facts is not my job. I'm not here to give you the news. I'm not Brian Williams. I'm here to do two things: entertain you, and state my opinion in a reasonable manner. You visit my site to do two things: read, and agree or disagree with what you just read.
I want to have fun with this again.
Looking Ahead...
As I approach 50,000 views (a significant milestone to be sure), my resolve to keep this thing going has become stronger. And while I still want to be a prominent liberal voice on the internet, the coming posts will be less fact-oriented and more humorous. That's not to say that I won't back my claims up with data or spouting outright falsities like my counter-parts on the right do. That's their ignorant bubble to play in, not mine.
What I mean is this: if I write it down and publish it in a post, it is (to my knowledge) accurate. I will still hyperlink to relevant sources if I feel like I need to, but other than that, you're all smart enough to use Google. If you don't believe me on something, either look it up yourself, or bring it up in the comments section. That is what the comments section is for. I promise that if you ask nice enough, I'll back up any claims I made in the corresponding article.
Simply put: I don't want my future posts to look like they belong on Politico or ThinkProgress. I want to get back to why I started writing this and to how I was writing it from the beginning. I want to see more discussions in my comments section, and would love to get more of them started through my email account.
If you want to know what to expect in the coming weeks, click here. This is one of my newest and last posts, and it happens to be one of my favorites. It was my old self breaking through, and it's what I hope to be returning to very soon.
That's all for now. Thank you for reading. To those of you returning, welcome back to your happy place. To those of you just joining us, well...
Welcome to your new happy place.
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