The Un-blog

Once upon a time in a life far away, I was a journalist and a newspaper columnist. My column was not political, or philosophical. It didn’t give instructions on how to garden, lose weight, improve your love life, cook gourmet meals, live on a budget, or get out stains with ingredients commonly found in your refrigerator. It was just a danged old column about nothing (to modify a line from Hank Hill’s friend Dale)

After a series of “finding myself” phases where I raised horses, grew tomatoes, studied alternative health practices, and daydreamed about running away to Montana, I returned to writing, this time fiction, but I missed my weekly column. I had moved to a new town, Fairhope, Ala., and had no newspaper connections here. So I came up with a revolutionary idea.

I would write my column, but instead of looking for a newspaper or magazine outlet, I would post it on the Internet for anyone who wanted to read it. A Cyber column. A cylumn, if you will. I told my best friend about it.

“Oh, a blog,” she said, disappointingly unimpressed with my invention.

“A what?”

“A blog,” she repeated, then took me to several sites where other people were already hard at work implementing my brainstorm. Only momentarily daunted, my Pollyanna attitude took this as a sign that my idea could work, rather than proof that I was too late.

When my webdesigner mentioned a blog page, I immediately translated that as “my cylumn.” So here, good folks, I will update you every Friday on all manner of observations, ideas, happenings, people, and thoughts from my life. True to form, my cyber column (blog, if you must) is About Nothin’.