April 6th, 2005 marks two years of the existance of P6 in one form or another. It feels weird to make note of it when I don't really make note of my birthday, but it seems traditional on the blognet.

Because of the anniversary thing, I thought I'd share the first fruit of my page-per-day project. It needs editing.

I'm keeping the rest to myself until I figure out what I'm writing it for.

I never intended to be a blogger.

What happened is, the nature of my diabetes changed…I became insulin dependant. And since, like most men, I was in denial about my health problems as I wasted away literally to the edge of death, my health took me right out of the labor market.

Fortunately for me, I’ve been aggressive and ambitious enough that my disability payments put me well above the poverty level for a family of four. Unfortunately for me, I find it totally unacceptable to be inactive…I am still aggressive. I am still ambitious.

However, I am also pushing 50 years old and (as previously mentioned) was on death’s door.

There’s a certain level on which I saw all that as a challenge. Ambitious Black men have little choice but to see any obstacle as a challenge. You run into walls all over the place — the walls every other ambitious person faces and, every so often, one of those “special” walls reserved for Black folks. Both sets of obstacles are irrational and so need an irrational response.

But I digress. Or more accurately, I foreshadow.

Anyway, I saw a challenge and since I’ve had to restart my life several times I figured it was time for another reboot. I still have all the skills I’ve gained from all manner of jobs, encounters with all manner of people and attitudes, personal obsessions…all the things that took me from a foot messenger to Assistant Vice President in a Japanese bank. I thought, and still think, that you can’t do that but so many times before you die. This restart will likely be the last so I needed to think about it clearly, find something I want to do until I’m unable to do anything anymore. At the particular time, though, I wasn’t able to do much more than read and bitch.

Which leads me to blogging.

Blogging had just hit the media radar screen big time by bringing repercussions, symbolic though they be, to Trent Lott over his wistful reminiscences of the good ol’ days. His Confederate dreams of Dixiecrat dominance didn’t surprise me and therefore didn’t annoy me. Much. I was far more annoyed by the Black folks that obediently lined up to defend him and the Republican Party’s defense of him.

But I was interested by reports that the challenge Lott faced was driven by Internet sites, weblogs. I came to realize several of the sites I read regularly, those with the most trenchant commentary, were weblogs. And honestly, because I’ve been online for GOD knows how long and am interested in technology in general, my very first thought was, “there’s got to be a way I can make money here.” It was a matter of watching the direction of this thing and trying to get out in front of it.

I’ve always been more interested in selling shovels than prospecting for gold. Since it looked like it was going to go large I thought I’d write some desktop blogging tools. Programming was one of the skills I developed as a tool to support my corporate advancement; I enjoyed it, and if you catch the right product you can do rather well while maintaining a great degree of independence. I’d also learned no one, including me, really knows what they want their software to do until they see it. Seeing a new product category, I decided I needed to play with it for a while to see what blogging software needs to be capable of. So after about four months of reading blogs, I opened an account with Blogger and began the experiment.

Such was my thinking. But I discovered quickly that blogs were pretty much what I was looking for, for those two online decades. I want to share the first post from my second day with the Blogger account that sums up where I was at. In the tradition of blogging I repeat it with typos intact.

Second day of "Blogging"

In quotes because I playing with it, really.

This could become an obsession for someone (like me) with too much goddamn time on their hands. Especially if you've been reading blogs for a while.

Blogs have me online so much I can't talk shit about the "web surfers" of olden days, the people who clicked random links for entertainment. I've been berserk recently, following the war discussions, and it hasn't been pleasant (more on that later).

Anyway, I'm getting the feel for what a successful blogging tool is like. I get to modify XREBlogger/XREBloggregator/Whatever I'm gonna call it accordingly…just a bit is all that's necessary. But of course that's not the only reason I'm interested in this.

Truthfully, I've wanted a public speaking platform ever since Intersection days. And in those days I was looking at a specific set of goals and ideas. Those goals are still good but there's a bag of other stuff that has me concerned, not least of which is the way the RIME Current Events/Debate conference seems to have risen to devour the public debate space (man, you got to be old as hell to remember that!). The bag is getting too big, too full. I need to develop some kind of focus.

Crushing asshole comments and rhetoric feeblely disguised as logic is easy. Getting heard is hard and getting individuals to change their behavior is harder. Influencing the public debate alone is probably a sisyphean task. Finding and linking up with the right folks is only slightly less difficult.

A single blog is insufficient unto the task. A network though, properly used…

And "properly used" is the problem. It is my experience that too many grass-roots types (and I could name names) are as concerned with recognition as correctness. A lot can't seem to think of a solution that doesn't require themselves at the top of the pyramid. Human nature, I suppose. A number of folks are just pissed da fuck off and their idea of activism is ragging on people…more human nature. And a lot of the discussion takes place in self-reinforcing groups of people who don't know how the system operates. As such, those discussions have self-reinforcing errors.

Lotta lotta problems, lotta lotta issues. Notta lotta answers, because I feel like I've lost touch with folks on the ground. Alll this down-time has let me know that.

I have a couple of ideas, though. Primary among them is finding some way to facilitate the communication and exchange of ideas among the grass-roots. A lot of the discussion is done on the cheap, Yahoo mailing lists and such. Good looking web sites and/or blogs that folks will want EVERYONE to know about would help. A method of letting people know about new information would help as well--something like www.weblogs.com, maybe, or better, like www.syndic8.com specializing in syndicating Black interest/leftist/activist weblogs.

I'm feeling, though truthfully the public platform thing is more appealing to me (damn that human nature!), the networking thing is more important.

If I'm serious…and I think I am…I got work to do.

(Note to self: the application MUST HAVE A SPELL-CHECKER)
(Second note: a grammar checker would be nice too, but I don't know how! sob!)

So it began. And it continues. As I write every day, it feels like I’m shifting, changing styles, evolving. Yet looking back over two years of writing and linking I find I’ve been consistent to a degree that shocks me. I suspect as this current project proceeds, I’ll find out a few things about myself…maybe even a few things I don’t want to know. It wouldn’t be the first time.