Happy Birthday, Bus Blog

I’ve been blogging since early 2004.  You wouldn’t know it, because I change platforms like clothing (although they’ve all carried the Far From Relevant brand name).  I started out on LiveJournal, moved to MSN Spaces, jumped to blogger, wordpress, blogger again.  I have this habit of abandoning a blog as soon as it becomes moderately popular (Music at Knife Point still receives hundreds of hits each day and I haven’t updated it in over a year), often retreating deep into my personal journal.

Never, though, have I considered dropping blogging altogether.  Through Matthew Good’s monstrous online presence I was introduced to my favourite contemporary writer about 4 years ago, shortly after I tried my thumbs at blogging.

Tony Pierce is frequently funny, inventive, successful, and doesn’t give a fuck enough that I’ve consistently enjoyed his shit since I came across his website.  I think maybe one of the things that I was attracted to at first was the sense of history in his posts; it seemed when I first started reading him that he’d been blogging forever and I drank the sense of celebrity about him.

Sure, I had no idea what the fuck he did, for the first month I was pretty well convinced that he flew Chopper 1 for the XBI (then I wasn’t so sure, then I laughed at myself, but now I’m pretty convinced again).  Over the years I’ve followed him lose his job at E!, get a job at Buzznet, lose that too, become the paid editor of the LAist and finally get picked up by the LA Times, the newspaper he lampooned for years for not utilizing their resources and being awesome.  Following his tremendous work as the LA TImes’ blog editor I’ve watched him utilize their shit and make awesome.

I own Tony Pierce’s books How To Blog and, like, 100 copies of Stiff – all of them have been signed.  I read Stiff pretty frequently.  I met a girl some months back who thought she knew a lot about the English language and all of it’s conventions, talking a lot about classical literature, even going as far as to say that you can witness decay in the English language over the course of the last century. Well, I lol’d and then told her that rather than witness decay I’ve noticed evolution.  Language is the bridge between experiences, and as our experiences as English speakers mutate so do our language.  We’re not writing tombs disguised as tomes anymore, we’re almost at a natural voice.  People are saying what they want to say, the bridge is crossed by every person every day.  And she still thought she say decay?  I wanted her to read the aforementioned books, and tell me she didn’t enjoy them even though Mr. Pierce says Fuck Editing and Fuck Punctuation.

I told Tony about this.  He told me to make her a simple wager.  If she enjoys them, she puts out.  If she doesn’t, I do whatever she wants.  Degree in Poetry, let me tell you.  Well, she didn’t put out, and that’s no fault of Tony Pierce but perhaps a fault of yours truly, or if we want to ditch the false modesty, the fault of Ms. Grammarian.  I stopped talking to her shortly after.

Tony brings something to the internet every day.  News about his hip-happenings, LA, sometimes politics or religion, but mostly he just keeps it real.  Every once in a while I get in a slump about writing, I mindlessly click on the bus blog (which is one of my quick links in the fire fox toolbar) and read a post that has me bobbing my head like a rap song going “hell yeah! This is why I do this shit!”  Likely the most incredible part of this whole thing is that he’s been doing it for seven years.

Happy 7th Birthday, bus blog!