Writing Goofy Shit

A long time ago in another life (actually 5 or so years ago at another job), I used to write a weekly opinion column. My general tone was mostly of a serious bent… commentary on local or national issues, potshots at politicians, and so on. It ran Thursdays and the editor of the paper I worked at often told me that letters or emails concerning the content of the op-ed page usually went skyward after my column ran.

These were generally not favorable towards me (or to the paper’s management for printing that tripe) but at least we knew people were reading my written thoughts, and that the piece had compelled them think or react. This is a good thing since most columns by a local writer in a local paper are largely ignored, or read and quickly forgotten.

After I left the newspaper I continued to write, posting on a regular basis to a blog I had set up. I would also publish my blog posts as links on my Facebook page. Both were generally overlooked – the blog received only a few hits a day, and the Facebook links seldom if ever garnered any comments.

I took the blog offline for a few months earlier this year. No sense in keeping it going since the only reader was me, right? After some reflection I decided to reactivate it and take a different approach to my writing. This time around, I decided to focus mostly on lighter topics such as my obnoxious neighbors, snafus in my life, something unusual or funny that caught my interest, and so on.

Instead of spending hours researching a topic and more hours editing a post to make it just “so” I decided to simply type out whatever came to mind. I think about a lot of goofy shit during the course of the day. but on occasion something will seem to stick in the ole noggin, and this will often turn out to be a blog post.

Writing is a lot more fun with this approach. After all, I could rant about what a raving batshit loonball Michele Bachmann is but there’s a well-paid syndicated columnist somewhere who does a far better job of lambasting her than I could ever do. And he or she almost certainly gets read more than me.

So, for the most part I now write only goofy shit. The blog links on my Facebook page get clicked on more, and the blog itself is getting more visits than it ever did. So why is that?

Did I suck as a serious columnist/blogger? I don’t think so. All my newspaper columns are saved on my computer, and over the years I’ve read through them numerous times. Without sounding like an egotist, some of them were pretty damned good. And they did well as a printed piece. As blog posts they might as well as not have ever been published at all.

What I’m thinking is that is comes down to the general mindset nowadays of the blogging and Facebooking public. We are tired to death of all the bad news shoved in our faces every day. To be honest, it’s a lot easier to write about negative topics than it is to write about what your cat dragged in, or describe the unearthly-looking thing you found growing in the produce bin of your refrigerator – so thus we’re inundated with a never-ending stream of blog posts from literally millions of authors about all that’s wrong in the world.

Me, I’d rather read goofy shit these days. Watching or reading the news doles out all the depression I can stomach. The silly, amusing stuff makes me smile or laugh out loud and forget for a few seconds exactly how deep in doo-doo my country (and the world) is.

I assume you’d rather read goofy shit, too. Hopefully I’m able to at least make you grin for a minute as I talk about whatever non-serious thoughts happen to be in my head when I sit down at the keyboard.

From my end of things, it’s a lot more fun to write now because I’m writing for the joy of it and not because I feel compelled to.