For one reason or another, I’ve spent the past month or so obsessed with social media.

I can’t quite pin down the root of the obsession itself, but I have some basic ideas as to its factors. For one, and the most obvious one, is that roughly two months ago I started a band. Since I was nineteen, I have not been a regular member of any band, let alone the frontman and guiding force for any band. I’ve spent my time producing records, engineering bands both live and in the studio, earlier on managing an artist and running a small record label, and the occasionally appearing as a sideman on other people’s shows.

The point is, along with having a band of your own, comes the responsibility to let people know about your band. Being an occasionally social, occasionally antisocial, occasional butterfly, occasional anxiety-ridden misanthrope, I’m struggling to keep up the enthusiasm to constantly let people know what’s going on with my band on what should be a near-daily basis. As it turns out, when I’m being totally honest with myself, I’d say I like it exactly the same amount as I deplore it.

Regardless of the relative waxing and waning of my enthusiasm for self-promotion, my need for constant attachment to the social media of the day is not going away anytime soon (seeing as though my band isn’t going away any time soon), and its necessity in my life has ultimately led to a sort of near-constant obsession with the medium itself (that’s right, the medium of social media).

And that brings me to why I’m writing this blog entry now, in a blog that nobody really knows I have, and that hasn’t been updated in who-know-how-long, and is certainly not being read by anybody. The ultimate reason is that I’ve become somewhat enamored of the possibility for self-expression unearthed by this “internet” thing everybody’s talking about. And so I’ve decided to take blogging a little more seriously.

I’ve made this promise before, not only on this page, but within the past year on a short-lived site called postpulp (defunct), and years ago on a somewhat longer-lived and vaguely successful site called The Village Broadsheet. Seeing as though none of my previous efforts have stuck, I have no reason to believe (and nor should you, dear reader–that is, if you even exist) that this one will last either, or that I will find any reasonable amount of time to devote to writing anything more than this pale and ill-conceived manifesto.

In any case, here it is, my thin-skinned and poorly supported promise to you (of whose existence I am still unsure), and myself (of whose existence I am only vaguely more certain): This is my blog, I will write in it.

Best of luck in the arena of existence,
Eric

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