This is your basic intro post, which — this being a blog — will gradually be buried underneath more recent posts, so I'll eventually have to put this info somewhere more accessible for those who're wondering what the hell this thing is supposed to be about.
So what the hell is this thing supposed to be about?
For a bunch of years I posted an increasingly occasional series of longish essays collectively called "D.O.O.M. Sayings," so named not because I'm a pessimist but because they were on a parody business site for "Defecatory Obfuscation Options Management" I put together via Genuine Hand Coding back in the earlyish Web 1.0 days. The gag was that D.O.O.M. was in the business of creating, managing and otherwise dealing with bullshit for its clients; and the only thing the D.O.O.M. Sayings essays really had in common was in reacting to all the varieties of socio-political bullshit we bury ourselves in.
Then my equally Web 1.0-era host, an ISP, decided to get out of the business of hosting personal websites, evicting Defecatory Obfuscation Options Management and all its other tenants.
It was just as well; I hadn't posted anything new there for a couple years. Though I had a lot of fun writing snarky social commentary, each essay took a while to write, and I wasn't always able (or interested enough) to devote the necessary time. I eventually decided it might be better to dial it back to typical-blog-length posts ... and now I'm finally trying that out.
The other thing I came to realize as I got older is that snark is fine for throwing rocks at sacred cows but doesn't do anything constructive and, in large doses, merely encourages divisiveness. And God knows we've already got all the divisiveness we can handle.
So while I'm probably not going to entirely eschew the snark and cynicism, seeing as the heart of a smartass sonofabitch still beats in my graying chest, my goal this time is to try to stumble toward a way forward for this symphony of grumbles and screams we're calling a society. I doubt I'll find a way that'll resonate with enough other people to accomplish anything, but I figure it's got to be better than just adding to the grumbles and screams.
The "Gray Matters" part of the theme reflects my growing belief that hardly any issue breaks down into stark black-and-white, no matter how much we'd like our own arguments to be the tidy, short Definitive Answer. This influenced enough of my later D.O.O.M. Sayings that this time around, I might as well get it up front in the blog title that I'm becoming biased away from being four-square in favor of or against any one-sentence stance or "solution."
Some housekeeping notes: This blog has the adult-content warning simply because I'll likely toss out some shits and fucks from time to time; I'm not planning to post porn or anything.
Also, while I'm considered a competent editor by those I've edited for, I'm not great at editing myself, so forgive me when I ramble away from the point or sneak in some snark that might detract from said point. When I was doing this on a personal website, I was able to hide some of the rambling behind a little icon that readers could click or mouse over to see the ramble, but good old Blogger.com filters out the coding that made that trick work. (Discovering this while playing with Blogger pried some of those aforementioned shits and fucks out of me.)
Last, while I'm going to leave comments enabled at least to start with, I don't guarantee that if I get any I'll ever read them, much less moderate them. I'd love to have the kind of blog that draws only thoughtful and civilized commenters, but that kind of blog probably only exists in Mark Zuckerberg's opium dreams.
OK, I think that's it. We now return you to the shitfest already in progress.
