When Gazzman Doug Imbrogno asked if I’d like to start my own blog, where my weekly columns would be reprinted but I’d also get to blog new stuff, I was excited by the idea. It didn’t take long to lose my nerve. I put so much of my life out there already with the “Smell the Coffee” column in the Sunday Gazette-Mail. Why would I think anyone would want to read more?

Right about then, I ran across Dilbert creator Scott Adams’ website, where he wrote:

“The beauty of blogging, as compared to writing a book, is that no editor will be interfering with my random spelling and grammar, my complete disregard for the facts, and my wandering sentences that seem to go on and on and never end so that you feel like you need to take a breath and clear your head before you can even consider making it to the end of the sentence that probably didn’t need to be written anyhoo. If that doesn’t inspire you to read my blog, I don’t know what will.”

Hmm. I have many rambling, incomplete thoughts that aren’t meaty enough to develop into columns. (Actually, the almost non-existent meat content of my columns has earned them the Vegan Seal of Approval as Acceptable for Consumption.) I’ve been wastefully allowing those many rambling and incomplete thoughts to simply fade away, gone forever, never shared. How shamefully selfish of me.

Like Adams, I was seduced by the freedom to write whatever I liked without the newspaper’s ridiculous restriction that it be true. Bah! Who needs to check facts? It just slows you down. (gazzman editor’s note: Ha! We’ll be editing you still in gazzblogs! Ed.)

Adams also said, “The only reason I dare writing this blog is because I have absolutely no sense of embarrassment. Most people would be horrified at the prospect of proving their ignorance to thousands of readers. My attitude is more along the lines of I have thousands of readers? Cool.”

Like Adams, I have pretty much no sense of embarrassment left. I’ve spent 41 years as a klutz extraordinaire and eight years as a columnist, where desperation for material prompts me to reveal my every humiliation and stretch — or confine it — to fit my weekly space in the Sunday paper. After awhile, you get numb to it. I passed numb years ago.

Finally, the astute Adams (my role model, my exemplar, my liege) penned this observation: “The blogger’s philosophy goes something like this: Everything I think about is more fascinating than the crap in your head.”

Being so well acquainted with the crap in my head, I really hope that’s not true.

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