blog is

While I'm reticent to commit upon this space the cardinal sin of blogging – that sin being to blog about blogging (or, perhaps, it's to call writing about blogging the cardinal sin of blogging IDK) – I've become concerned (fairly or un-) over the last several weeks that in the whatever-it-becomes internet era we're entering that there will be – as with all of the internet eras prior – an urge to standardize and impose rules upon the blog or, rather, the blog form: to be considered a blog an internet presence must have x, y; it must have a title; it must contain this / that, yadda yadda yadda – and I thought it might be useful, if only for myself (the only person for whom this space is generally useful in the first place), to commit to the digital ether what I consider the blog form to be at this very moment, weds/20230322 between 1000 and 1036.

A blog is whatever the fuck the person creating it wants it to be, an ever-unfurling, living, breathing snapshot of its creator in the moment of publication: it is defined not in what you post but rather in that you post (it can also be defined by your periods of silence – these, too, are a snapshot of you), a whole, a totality revealed only in frequency and existence and even then a form remaining at its purest and most unfiltered open to endless permutation and variation, an amorphous nebula that thrives on iteration and change: a captionless picture IS a blog post; a link devoid of commentary IS a blog post; a rambling 3000-word diatribe IS a blog post; a thoroughly-composed 60,000 word novella about your cat's telepathic powers IS a blog post; a sentence to follow up on a 3000 word diatribe IS a blog post; a single word IS a blog post: it is the synthesis and collision of these dashed-off or deeply thought proofs of existence that constitute the single greatest vehicle of internet-connected individual expression available to us: it can be as human as we are – but only if we let it.