Let sleeping blogs lie

I just checked my list of bloggers. I have 28 blogs on the list (these are separate from my LJ friends). There are another five or so nationally known blogs (usually on politics or popular culture) that I check from time to time to keep up with what’s being talked about. Then there are around ten that are linked on some of my favorite blogs that I also read occasionally.

When I first got online in 1997, I was all about my chat room. Actually, there were two chat rooms–the one where I met my writing partners and made some other good friends, and one that was for authors that I visited from time to time but where I rarely talked and made no friends. About four years later, my main “room” had changed a lot, and my focus shifted to message boards. There were four of those that interested me and where I made an entirely different group of online friends based on shared interests.

About 18 months ago, my interest shifted to blogs, and around that time, I followed Tim to Live Journal. I don’t consider myself to be a blogger. I like what I’m doing because it’s no pressure and random. It’s not a problem, but reading all those blogs can be. As a person who’s always shunned TV as a time thief, it’s deplorable how much of my time and energy I’ve given to this computer monitor. So I’ve cut back on blogs–and cut back again. I may go a couple of weeks and read only my top two or three favorite blogs, then rapidly skim some of the others for anything of interest.

So I was doing well with my online time management. I’m not an e-bay, craigslist, myspace, or online games person (although the games thing was a passing interest for a while), so except for keeping up with Live Journal, I’ve been using my Internet time for research.

And then… in the middle of that research–I swear!–another blog sneaked into my online world. I’m not going to link to it. I’m not going to promote it. Not because it’s anything that’s weirdly out of character for me. It’s not porn. It’s not Republican. It’s not dogmatic. Far from all of that. This blogger seems to be a regular person. A working man. A very articulate working man with a distinctive voice and an unapologetic attitude that is so not politically correct that it’s… refreshing. And I’m so jaded by liars and posers that I can’t believe he’s real. I keep waiting for the “Gotcha,” and until I’m certain it’s not coming, I guess I plan to keep him my reading secret.

It’s murky, this online world.