I Am DB

I’ve always kinda thought of personal blogs as being…what’s the right word?  Oh yes: bullshit.

Why should you care what I have to say about anything? Who am I to ask for your time and attention? Whatever subjects might be of interest to me, rarely if ever do I have anything particularly profound, unique or insightful to add to the conversation. In fact, I’m quite certain that whatever I do want to talk about is being covered with more depth, panache and perspective by some professional journalist somewhere. Whenever I stumble onto someone’s blog, I usually invert the question that led off this paragraph: why should I care what you have to say about anything? Follow-up questions might include (but are not limited to):

• Why am I supposed to be interested in the minutae of your day?
• What makes you worth listening to?
• Seriously…who are you?

On the other hand, who am I to not care about what you have to say? You probably have friends and family who are plenty interested, so why should you care if I think you’re a tool? You shouldn’t. And I shouldn’t care if you think the same of me. I have friends with blogs, and I enjoy checking up on them and seeing what’s on their mind. I’ve also come across some really cool blogs out there, often centered around a specific subject and written by people who know that subject well and have interesting and informative things to say about it. Just through the WordPress homepage, spotlighting different blogs every day through its Freshly Pressed feature, I’ve come across tantalizing recipes, amazing photography and just some damn funny writers.

And so it is with that attitude adjustment that I finally enter the fray. I say “finally” because despite my still-conflicted feelings about blogging, I’ve danced with this devil before. Or at least, I’ve stood against the gym wall at the dance, eyeing the devil but not quite making my move. The fact is that as far back as 2004 I’ve been telling people I might get around to doing something like this. There was even a little-seen site called “Burncebits” that launched and folded within a two-week period circa February 2006. It’s a true collector’s item. Should you somehow obtain a copy, I’ll be happy to autograph it for you.

What kept the idea churning is that I do like to write, and for some reason that remains mysterious to me, people who have read my writing seem to enjoy it. So we come to it at last: I humbly introduce this blog which will primarily focus on…

…wait for it…

…movies and TV!

I really think this is an untapped market in the blogosphere – and even, if I may be so bold, on the internet at large – on which I can shine some long overdue light.

Or maybe I’m just another nobody who thinks I have something to say.

I believe this clip from The Daily Show – though it concerns political commentators – speaks quite appropriately to my negative feelings about blogging.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

That’s what blogging pretty much boils down to: who the fuck is that guy? But…I’m trying.

If you’ve stumbled upon this blog at random, I strongly urge you to move on. There’s nothing to see here. I can’t imagine that anyone who doesn’t know me would give a damn what I have to say about Lost or the Academy Awards or any other such topics likely to be covered here.

For those of you who actually came here of your own free will, I strongly urge you to move on as well. There must be more productive uses of your time than reading my rambles about all the fluff that I find interesting. Yeah, I know I probably sent you the link initially and told you to check it out, but why would you listen to me? Haven’t you taken in anything I’ve said here?

But to those of you who have long been on my case to do this – who have pushed, prodded, encouraged, insisted, conspired, harassed, harangued and harumphed – I have this to say to you: you better read every fucking post I write, and share them with everyone in your address book, so that the time I’ll inevitably pour into this endeavor will be justified. I’ll be checking up on you. Because understand this: now that I’m doing it, I will agonize over it. I will pour hours into it. I already have. It has taken me a certifiably absurd amount of time to get it to a place where I was ready to roll it out. Taking previous years worth of writing and formatting it, adding pictures, captions, tweaking the design and trying to make it satisfy the image in my mind (for his assistance with these tasks I owe a heavy debt to the great Clint Mosso) has kept me busy for far too long. Now that it’s out there, I have to actually maintain it…and knowing myself, I know that the stress of trying to keep up with everything I want to comment on (usually reactionary – half of what I always want to write about is a response to something I’ve seen or read myself) will consume me as the Ring of Power did Gollum. That desire to comment existed long before this blog, but now that I’ve got the outlet, I’ll be pressuring myself to use it. Given the length of time it takes me to write just about anything (you don’t want to know how long I spent on this page), I may be forced to beat you down if you’ve been on my case to do this and then you aren’t even reading it. So sign up for the automatic email updates or RSS this bitch, lest I find you and unleash a world of pain.

Finally, as much for my own amusement as anyone else’s, I will probably fill in gaps when I have no new, original content to offer by posting a lot of video clips. This whole blog enterprise might just be my way of creating a one-stop-shopping repository of my favorite videos. Seriously, this could become just a collection of Daily Show and Colbert Report segments. The clip above was only the beginning. You’re going to see so many of their segments here that I’m likely to get sued by Comedy Central or hired as a personal ass-wiper to Messrs. Stewart and Colbert. The advantage of this, of course, is that all this third-party content will surely illustrate how many funnier, more intelligent, more talented people are worth paying attention to than me. This will then lead you to go seek out their material instead of mine, which will free me from the burden of having to keep up with the blog at all. After everyone has lost interest, I can relax and go back to just writing my occasional thoughts on this or that and sending them to a chosen few who I think might actually care. You have walked right into my trap.

–DB, January 2012