WHY?

Warning. May contain something scarily like a mission statement. Yikes.

I've always been something of a cynic when it comes to blogs. "Why do you think that anyone cares what you have to say?" is a question I frequently find myself asking when confronted with innumerable barely-literate brainfarts about celebrities, documentations of some randomer's life or, heaven forbid, tumblrs (shudder). Unlike twitter, though, which is pretty uniformly crap (very few people can say anything worth saying in 140 characters) some blogs are genuinely interesting, or at least not entirely pointless. I have friends who blog about food and fashion. I find that dull. But largely because I find fashion, to quote a famous John, "irrepressibly drab and awful", and whilst I find food all too interesting, I want to eat it, not read about it.

Then there's the blogs I do read. Avidly. My first blog-love was the wonderful Speak You're Branes, which is all about taking the piss out of the clinically stupid and incurably right-wing comment-spewers of the BBC's Have Your Say, and is now sadly a limping shadow of its former comedic self. This, though, led me on to angryyoungalex, whose close analysis of everything from why sick jokes are (or aren't) funny through to why the French ban on the veil is essentially the same as making it mandatory to have your tits out is incomparable, funny, and incredibly convincing. Through that, I've discovered literally some other blogs that are worth reading for their insight and thought, which probably have a total readership of some other bloggers and various nutjobs and sadacts like me. Certainly in the hundreds rather than the thousands. So even they, then, good though they are, make me writing a blog ultimately pointless. Even if I could match their insight and wit, and anyone who knows me is introducing their face to their desk at the mere thought of my sense of humour, why bother, if nobody will read it. What's more, of those who do, I will be either preaching to the choir or talking to a brick wall. The internets doesn't change opinion, it reinforces it, as people find others who also hold their views and cling to them as evidence that they aren't just bog-standard, isolated fucknuts.

But, and mine is a big but (badum-tish) I've decided that I don't care for one pretty poor reason. This idea for a blog has been bouncing around in my head for a while now, and I've decided to let it out to have a run around. If I write about the things that aren't said that should be, the important aspects of a debate that are skimmed over or ignored and that guide our debates and thought processes down one very narrow track, then I'm not trying to change anyone's mind, but rather to open it, to make people aware of the possibilities that they're not looking at. Even if only twenty people ever read it, and they all think that everything that I've suggested is a gigantic steaming pile of walrus manure, at least they'll have thought about my ideas. Maybe?

Either than, or I'm just another futile scream in the packed, sweaty, overloud nightclub that is life, and anything I try to say will be drowned out by the din being made by the people who actually run the place.

Oh yeah, I can be pretty morbid and armchair-philosophical at times too, sorry.