A BOLD NEW TBP

OK, maybe I am a bit of a tease, or just one of many staring at his midsection these days, but, in fact, changes have been in the works for the past month or so. Most of these changes, I think, are for the better–certainly they’re better for me and, with nary an ad to be found on this site, I think you all can recognize that it’s my name and only my name on the side of this particular cyber-building.

So what’s going to be new and exciting?

To answer that question, I’ve got to give a little history lesson. I’ve been sending out electronic babblings for nearly a decade now, stretching from my seminary days right through three fun but lonesome years as a neophyte preacher in Nebraska, when writing about my experiences was perhaps the only thing that kept me from standing outside and baying at the moon.

In fact, I recently ran across some of my old writings from “back in the day”–you can read an archived version here–and I had a heck of an afternoon paging through the memories of my not-too-distant past. And you can tell that I was more or less blogging back in those days; I just didn’t know what to call it then, and neither did you.

Like I said, reading these old writings was a hoot. Except for one undeniable, depressing fact: My writing was so much better then compared to now. I mean, I sweated out the details on those essays. I wanted them to be the very best prose I knew how to write. Sure, there were typos galore. But man, I was proud of those pieces.

It’s not that I’m not proud of what I’ve done here. It’s just that I keep thinking this blog should be something it’s not–current, relevant commentary about daily events. That’s not a problem with my writing; that’s a problem with my perception of what this blog should be, particularly as compared to what you readers have consistently shown you’d like it to be.

And trust me, I know what you like. Firstly, you tell me; secondly, thanks to the power of technology, I know a little about who you are and what you do here. I don’t have the wide level of readership other blogs have. That’s fine; I’m not for everybody. But those of you who read me really read me. Some of you spend hours paging through my archives, looking for witty comments and places to advertise your 0nl1n3 c451n0.

Sometimes I get close to the kind of writing I used to do. Like this post, for instance, which one astute reader who was around back in the old e-mail days recognized. I’m grateful that I can still pull out some nice prose once in a while. But I’m greedy. I want to do more of it.

When I first started writing my personal observations, I had a model of the sort of writing I wanted to do. My model was the old Touring column which ran in Car and Driver magazine for about a decade, from the mid-80s to mid-90s. The column was just a one-page divagation by a rotating cast of the magazine’s great wordsmiths–maybe describing the experience of driving a Buick across Montana, or visiting the recently-liberated Czech Republic, or the little torture of forced closeness that comes from spending most of a vacation cooped up in a car with your loved ones. At its best, Touring was personal, confessional, and enlightening. One particular column dealt with an editor/photographer’s visit to the Field of Dreams movie site in Dyersville, Iowa, and how it helped him deal with his own ambivalent feelings about the father he never knew. I still get chills just thinking about reading that column–how often does a magazine article make you feel like that?

At its worst, of course, Touring was self-indulgent and blathersome, which I suspect is the reason why it went away, and also the reason why I’m apparently the only person on Earth who misses it. I was willing to tolerate the “hooray for me” stuff if it meant getting short, brilliant articles that would make your hair stand on end. Reading Touring taught me as much as I think I’ll ever know about the power of words to take you someplace private, someplace you can never quite experience, but can certainly have described for you.

Now, you readers know that TBP is not a hard-news, current events blog. Never has been, never will be–and especially not now. I’m changing the focus of this site from frequent topical pieces to less-frequent, longer works that I’ll actually bother to edit and polish. If blogs really are citizen journalism, I wanna be the person on page D2, the one who writes only a couple times a week, but always manages to poke you in the ribs, either with laughter (which I prefer) or poigniancy (which I am not above).

So I’m no longer going to feel the self-imposed pressure to post something every day, just because I have a blog. Instead, I’ll focus on writing column-length stuff a couple times a week. Pickin’ on the Big Ten will still be here, as will Search Engine Answer Guy and other stuff I know you all enjoy. But I’ll be crawling my way down the blogrolls with less-frequent updates. And I won’t be trying to comment on everything that happens in the world. We’re well into the ’scorched earth’ phase of the presidential campaign right now, and I am willing to donate my share of the world’s supply of outrage to those who need it to express their anger towards the candidate they were never going to vote for in the first place. You can have my portion of the shock over media bias, too–I used that up back in 1991.

But I digress. I’m resigned to the fact that some of you may not like the new TBP; it may not be topical enough for you, since I’m going to focus on snippets of life as opposed to broad-spectrum issues. It might even cost me my Flappy Bird status in the EgoEcosystem. I don’t care. I’m going to focus on giving you the best writing I can give you. You may not always be interested in what gets talked about here, but I hope you find the new pieces like tiny little treats.

Because that’s what they’re like to write. See you soon–but maybe not tomorrow.