Welcome to the 20th, or 25th, or 31st iteration of my blog. I’m sure I am not the first to have struggled with how to manage my online identity – or lack thereof. Over the course of the last 15 years that identity has taken many shapes. The cycle goes something like this:

1. Get bored with whatever I am reading, watching, or building in the physical realm.
2. Feel a need for social interaction and expression via the internet.
3. Convince myself that people might actually care what I have to say.
4. Further convince myself that what I have to say is in some way unique and beneficial to those who might read it.
5. Go through manic phase of excitement, thump my chest like Tony Robbins, and start a blog account.
6. Realize that before I blog I need a purpose that will be the common thread that brings me together with the minions who will suddenly start following me.
7. Confound myself with what that purpose might be, as my interests are vast, my knowledge deep, and my inner life very complicated.
8. After deciding what that purpose is, I obsess over the proper blog “theme”, pictures, icons, and look and feel that will express that. After fumbling through hundreds of looks I settle on one, customize it, and begin the process of writing.
9. I spend the first two weeks writing about all of the things that presently interest me, you know, those deep insightful things. The ones I was thinking about while becoming bored with everything mentioned in #1. I write and write and write.
10. Then I sit back and wait. Build it and they will come they say (James Earl Jones haunts me with those words). But they never do.
11. I check page views, links, likes, tweets, and all manner of other indications that my little corner of the internet universe means something to someone, to anyone, other than myself.
12. Sometimes there is a trickle of interest. Other times there is nothing. Sometimes the only interaction I have involves the comment spammers we all know and love. You’ve “arrived” when the porn star spam bots start trying to take over your comments.
13. Several weeks pass and I have made no new friends or acquaintances, no one has commented or said anything interesting, and quite frankly I am not even sure anyone has read or will read any of what I’ve written.
14. So I decide to stop and stop I do. The blog drifts off into nothingness. Out of mind, out of site.
15. At some point I forget I even did it until a year later when I get the domain renewal notice. Then I reflect and ask myself what the hell I was thinking and vow to never blog again….that is until I get bored.

I am now bored. So what the hell, let’s give this a go again. Eventually I may have minions. It’s more likely though that in 1 year I will be receiving a domain renewal notice and say to myself – you idiot. Not again.