Blog Number One

Ok. So here goes. I'm blogging.

But why?

I spent most of my day today at work (shout out to all my Wesley Owen peeps from the W1U - big up to your nine-iron) slowly coming to the decision that yes. Yes I was going to start my very own blog. "It's about time" I said to myself with a suggestive wink. "But what would be the point?" I answered as a customer looked on and slowly edged her way out of the shop in a subtle fashion so as to not startle the unhinged yet dashingly handsome sales assistant who was laying spread eagled on the shop floor talking to himself.

I came up with several possible answers, each one, to a greater or lesser extent, unsatisfactory.

I've been told a couple of times that I should keep a web-based journal as I don't often share my feelings and that some kind of online forum would be a positive outlet for all the emotions I'm bottling up. And while it did make sense to keep my secrets locked away from my loved ones just so I could then publish them on a public domain, I decided that I wasn't going to use this particular medium to expose my deepest and darkests.

I then figured that I would be able to use this as an opportunity to jot down all the great ideas I keep getting for plays, songs, sketches, films, radio dramas etc. Due to a healthy mix of perfectionism and utter laziness, I get an idea and then rarely see it through to completion. "I'll work on it later in life" I tell myself (still lying on the floor - the shops now empty) "when I have developed the artistic maturity to really nail it". But then that artistic maturity comes and the ideas have all been forgotten. I have new ideas but they're all silly and should be left for a time when my artistic maturity suddenly disappears and I realise that it wasn't artistic maturity after all - just wind. So this would be a great opportunity for me to keep a record of all those ideas so that I could come back to them later on. But then the "public domain" thing came up again and I realised that none of these ideas would be copyrighted. Now I don't mean to sound arrogant but my ideas are (oh my, how do I say this without betraying my inspiring humility) utter genius. If I tell you that one idea I've had for an inter-denominational conference involves a collection of nationally recognised church leaders and a giant vat of strawberry jam (I've already said too much) then you begin to understand why I would be less than happy with the best my brain has to offer being bandied around the internet for anyone to pick up on and exploit, claiming that they thought of it first.

I then thought that maybe I could use a blog to share my wisdom with the masses. Use my blog for good as thousands of millions from around the globe log onto this web address to experience my habitual profundity as it spews from my fingertips onto the computer screen. Some kind of exposé on the darkest netheregions of the human soul. But just as I was completing this thought (still on the floor except now there's a crowd) it occurred to me that I'm about as profound as an egg sandwich. It also dawned on me that, despite my previous reservations concerning idea stealage, I don't actually expect anyone to visit this site - ever. This will probably always be just for me.

Which led me to my next reason for having a blog. Why not just use it as a diary? Something to which I can look back on and think "oh yeah - I did that". But then the final and most conclusive occurence dawned on me. Apart from today and possibly tomorrow, I will most likely never visit or update this site again. It will just stay like this I should imagine, floating aimlessly about cyberspace until some technologically advanced virus in 2009 will wipe it out completely, making the past hour or so of my life (that being the time it took to set this all up and post this entry) utterly and depressingly pointless.

So why, after having come to that apocalyptic conclusion, did I decide to go ahead and start up a blog anyway? The answer's simple. Because everyone else is doing it.

Oh, and why "Confessions of an Innocent Man"? I'm open to suggestions.