Our Mission & Vision at K.G.A.B., or "Why are you starting a blog in 2020"

 "Why start a blog in 2020?" I hear you asking yourself, as I am asking myself. The reasons are myriad, so I'll provide a stupid explanation and a stupid explanation that might appear smart.

The stupid explanation is that I got into a Twitter fight with David Simon, and it made me feel really bad, so I began the process of deleting my tweets,

so I began to read my tweets and remember them, and I realized stuff from even 6 months ago was buried in the inconvenient fog of Twitter from three months ago, and I couldn't find all my tweets from the early pandemic or my game reviews, and it made me feel really mad,

so I deleted all my Tweets, deleted my account, then re-activated my account within 6 hours, and I declared to myself that I wouldn't get into fights on Twitter, or tweet angrily at GOP representatives, and I would only tweet stupid shit and connect with friends, and I broke that self-declaration within a week,

and it made me feel really ambivalent about giving even an ounce of writing thought to a platform that not only made me feel unlike myself, but that also uh handed the country to a brain-wormed dipshit when they could have just banned the dickweed.

Yet, I wanted to talk about the dumb shit I've been playing or reading or watching, and figuring out Tumblr seemed like too much configuring and all those modern blog-feed websites like Medium seemed caustic in a whole different way. And god knows, I'm not starting a podcast.

So here we are, at Blogspot, which is now Blogger, which is owned by Google, which makes me feel really bad, but here we are all the same, for it is 2006 and it is time for subscribing to RSS feeds.

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Anyone who knows me know that if I am in possession of stuff, I will surely proceed to say it. The stuff pours out of me, this torrent of opinion and association and considering, onto whoever is unlucky enough to be in the splash zone. Which is to say, if they are my friend or coworker or bar patron on an idle afternoon, they will hear of it. I hate this about myself. I hate that I often feel like bursting at the seams with points to make, things to reference, ideas to add onto, that I speak over others, like a child who forgets his manners. I forget my manners, often, and for this, I am sorry, you guys, and you strangers.

• Moreover, I'm writing this in the last week of 2020, nine and a half months into the COVID pandemic. I have been lucky, absolutely lucky, that I haven't lost my job or income, nor has my partner. And I even get to go into work, in a big building with less than 20 people in it, all of us masked and socially distanced, doing a small fraction of work for the community, and that makes me feel a bit more sane.

• But insane still I am, deprived of the spontaneity of conversation; like, remember when you'd get a few beers, and sit with your friends, and just talk for hours, the conversation winding and wheeling, easy and clear, and you emerge from the night with some things to think about, or an internal idea corrected, or at the worst, a few hours passed among pals. What a nice thing, to unload your stuff in a saying, then take on new stuffs from others who say.

• I used to write poetry as a way of parting with the stuff. Poetry was a way of sealing the Idea in a fine envelope of conceit and funky line breaks, tinkering with it a bit, and leaving it in a .TXT file for all eternity. Sometimes, it escapes, and you go to the midwest for a few years, returning with an MFA degree and deep knowledge of Moodle. Sometimes, it wanders into a digital form and a few months or years later, there it is - the Idea, retyped by someone (or at least copied & pasted), alongside other fine envelopes.

• I used to write poetry to do this, but since the second trimester of quarantine, it hasn't worked. I do write - but it's bad - which it always is - but it doesn't fit the things I want to talk about - which are stupid things - but all the old poems are full of stupid ideas - but I want to try this, a longer form.

• Look at how I'm writing right now - this is not how I write. This is how I imagine I write, high language, each comma changing the pitch or angle of my voice, as I lay my points out clearly, with nearly cliche metaphor, like a lawyer laying out a case. Jesus christ. It's not good! But here we are all the same. Maybe this can bust up my prose in some productive ways! Or maybe it'll solidify this as my style, which would be a disaster, but one must rush into disaster sometimes.

• I find myself wanting to say things more directly, which is only slightly less obtusely, and the things I want to say, at least right now, mostly concern video games. Not poetry - fucking' video games. That's been my go-to media for a while, and here, in the depths of COVID, it is what I engage with the most, alone at home, late at night, unsleeping. And I don't want to write poems about video games - I did that once and got lucky, so best not to try it again.

• And I want to talk about movies and TV and audiobooks and also, the shrinking world outside and the expanding world within, this screaming expansion of my dumb interior that I can't just let sit anymore, the stuff turning to junk turning to crust turning to poofs of spores emerging from a long-forgotten lunch box.

• Also, and lastly, I tried keeping a media diary, but it felt silly almost. Like, I wasn't trying and keeping up with it, and my thoughts were slapdash. I'm OK with that for my book diary (that's PRIVATE), but as these ideas keep rolling out inside my head as I walk back and forth between the front room, middle room, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, back yard while staring at the one of the Baltimore spy plane's last cruises, I want more for it.

• Perhaps the rot of Twitter and this voyeur & exhibitionist age have seeped into me, and I just wanna show my shit off. Like, look at me, in this photo, with a famous landscape behind me - which is the focus, myself or the scene, or is it the combination?

I don't want anyone to look at this, yet I need someone to possibly look at it, for me to give the care this needs. The invisible, potential reader, who I do not want, is who I want. It makes no sense, but here we are all the same.

And so that's our mission here. I am, in a way, writing for no one, which allows for someone to read it. I can't guarantee I won't delete all of this all of a sudden, or remove posts willy-nilly. I can't guarantee I'll be rapidly updating or churning it out. And I can't guarantee this won't become a LiveJournal in a way. But I can guarantee I will say some stupid shit, and at length. I will be wrong, often, and I will write wildly stupid things. It is the way of it.

So there we are! Let's go.