Ocelopotamus

I am officially giving up. Throwing in the towel. Yes, it’s true: I am abandoning my difficult four-year struggle to not blog.

I do not do this thing lightly. I know that it’s ridiculous for someone as overextended as I always am to even think about starting a blog. That’s what’s kept me from diving in all these years. I think: I can’t even keep up with my overflowing email inbox most of the time. I have a cluster of little Web sites I never have enough time to maintain at the level they deserve. How dare I bring home a puppy.

But not blogging has been very taxing work. The thing is, I’m pretty much addicted to blogs. I already spend several hours a day reading blogs and news sites, and identifying Items of Tremendous Significance that I’d like to share with others. And I figure: I’m already doing the homework. I might as well show up to class.

And now that I’m a good 7 years away from my decade of writing and performing in Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, maybe I just need an outlet for my bursts of randomness.

So I’ve spent the last week learning my way around WordPress and Cutline, and here I am. Of course nobody even knows I’m here yet: I haven’t even told my friends. I’m blogging in secret, furtively, by moonlight. That can’t be healthy. I guess I’d better email some people.

In the meantime, my hope for Ocelopotamus is that I’ll be able to achieve a nice, eccentric-but-appealing mix of progressive politics and culture — books, film, and TV from the perspective of a peripatetic pansy, and music from the viewpoint of an unrepentant old New Waver with a soft spot for 60s folkies. (To steal a formulation from Donny & Marie: I’m a little bit David Bowie, I’m a little bit Joan Baez.) Toss in a dash of the Chicago fringe theater and performance scene, and the obligatory cat picture now and then. And of course that cockeyed I’m-a-Potato sense of humor that all three of my fans can’t get enough of.

In an even greater act of hubris, I’m leaving the comments turned on. My current plan is to turn them off for each post after about a week. But if I ever get enough readers that I can’t keep up with the comments or fend off the spammers, I might have just have to go commentless.

So: No guarantees how long this experiment will last. It may prove to be less realistic than the imaginary tree-climbing pachyderm it’s named after. But for the time being, vive le blog.