Internet Writing in 2005
I kind of like the introductory manifesto to my first blog post on April 13th, 2005.
I’ve moved from columnist to blog author. I’ve always thought that blogs were for uninterestingpeople who shop at Hot Topic and own the entire Drive Thru Records catalog.
That distinction between blogger & writer has always stuck with me. I’ve thought of myself as an original writer who uses the medium of the Internet in contrast to the blogger who might add commentary to things that are already in existence.
From late 2003, Amir convinced me to write a column for BeingFamous.com called Heller’s Corner: Thursdays With Heller. Most of those columns were lost in the ether, because the developer who lived in like Toronto wasn’t available on AIM for a few weeks and the servers crashed.
Those columns were very ranty and tried to be provocative. My biggest influences were Mitch Hedberg, Family Guy, and my friends, . So an emphasis on word-play, ‘obscure references’ and inside-jokes. I used to write in the voice of a college comedy newspaper, which I was also running at the time (The Sneeze: A Front For Illegal Activities) but I liked the Internet more because more people could pay attention to what you were doing than just the students on your campus (though I dropped off a bunch of Sneezes in college towns up-and-down the California coast.)
In the months before graduating from college (2005) I started the HellersCorner blogspot as a way to catalog the end of my life as the ‘Party King of Davis.’ I didn’t have any job prospects so I traveled, and wrote about what I was doing.
I think that the Internet has been instrumental in my process as a writer. I like that you can see an improvement in my writing from any moment since 2005… I mean how the fuck is this even a joke?
In Marx’s world view, Religion is the Opium of the Masses. In Opium Den’s, Opium is the Opium of the Masses
It passes the Family Guy ‘obscure reference test’, it’s an attempt at word-play, and it’s a shout-out to all my homies from leftist high school (which I guess is actually where I learned how to write.)
I used to tack on a few jokes at the bottom of every post, because I thought of them during the writing process, and needed to tell somebody, (luckily today we have Twitter so I can write more efficiently.)
At the end of my first blog post I say:
I hope that my blog is so esoteric, that you will have to know my ever move to understand it.
“Oh my god I can’t believe she wore that.”
Which is a sentiment I still feel today. I love it when one person feels my most esoteric Tweets that combine nuanced knowledge of specific kinds of music with a somewhat well-read understanding of the news. I like it because it makes me feel like I could have friends everywhere, and me and all of my friends and you and all of your friends can someday hang out in real life (maybe at next year’s Summer Commune) and then we can all come up with ideas to improve the world.
But at the same time, I’m in the marketplace as a writer, and I hope that a growing number of people feel my internet-savvy oeuvre so that I can get increasingly paid.
7 months ago • 2 notes
