I Made a Blog and This Post Explains It

Hi. If you’re reading this you probably saw a tweet or Facebook post, so thanks for clickin and readin.

There isn’t an important topic I’d like to talk about today, so what I will talk about is this blog: its beginnings, its purpose, and what I hope it’ll end up achieving.

THE BEGINNING

Not too long ago I had this idea I could be a travelling one man show where I would sing and strummed a guitar (or banjo) and tell stories and perform magic tricks and get paid for it. Upon reflection, though, I deemed that scenario too fanciful — I could never make money doing that! — so I decided to take the more prosperous path and become a writer and create a blog.

My toughest problem in creating this blog was: what do I write about? Like, it’s easy to write, I’ve been doing it for years, all you do is hit keys on the keyboard — thank God, too, because my handwriting is unbearable — but people don’t want to read the blithering nonsense of a nobody. There needs to be a reason to read, a hook for interest, and it was hard to think of one. It was hard because I was afraid picking angle X might restrict me from talking about topic Y, or maybe angle X was too boring and bad and I should really go with angle Z, but angle Z would make it even more difficult to discuss topic A than if I wrote from angle X, so maybe it would be better to approach from angle X than angle Z, even if it restricts me from talking about topic Y.

So yeah it took me awhile to think things through and flesh out what I wanted.

What I finally landed on was the simple title at the top of this page: From the Heartland. I picked this title since I’ll be speaking from the heart, I live in the heartland of Illinois, and the Midwest is the heartland of America; the mark of a truly great blog name, after all, is a triple entendre, so obviously I went with it.

THE PURPOSE

The general topics I want to cover are political and cultural, but not pop culture, more like folklore and ethnic American culture. The reason for why I decided not to cover Pop culture is because, to me, it feels empty and vacuous, and I don’t want to study a subject I believe to be devoid of meaning. And my rationale for why Pop culture feels bereft and barren is that it’s not truly popular culture but culture of popular people, ya know?

Like, think of the styling of Pop music or Pop fashion. Do you think those styles started organically in the public, or rather created by a select few and disseminated to a wider audience? I think it’s the latter, which is what I mean when I say Pop culture is really the culture of popular people, because it’s first conceived of by successful music stars or fashion designers and then spread to the public, as opposed to the opposite, which would be a sound or design becoming popular among the public and then adopted and adapted by a successful few.

You could also think of it in terms of high school, where the cool kids might start wearing cool bracelets, and everyone else starts wearing those bracelets because they want to be cool like the cool kids.

Basically, if Pop culture accurately reflected a popular American sound, fashion, identity, or thing, then I would cover Pop culture. But I’m not going to cover Pop culture, because it doesn’t accurately represent any of that; instead, the purpose of this blog will be to search for a common understanding of ‘America’, to seek a distillation of ‘American Spirit’, including a popular notion of what it means to be ‘American’, to describe the lives — past and present — of Americans, and paint a picture of what America could or should be in the future, with the ultimate goal of finding, and then telling, the perfect All-American story, which encompasses everything I just listed.

Essentially, I want this blog to produce popular culture.

THE DREAM

I’ve laid out how this project started, and what I hope to accomplish, so here’s where I’ll tell you what I hope it achieves.

Most of all, I want this blog to give me a better understanding of me, my surroundings, and my place in it, because, like many 20 somethings, I feel removed or isolated or detached from the place around me — a feeling compounded by screens and the prominence of digital life — because the difference between reality and my perception of it is jarring.

Imagine a goldfish in it’s fish bowl being emptied into the ocean, and how that goldfish might feel immediately after being dumped: You swim around the same circle for 22 years and love it; you find purpose and meaning and security within the finite confines of your fish bowl around which you repetitively swim circles, only to find out that circular bowl was an artificial, arbitrary barrier meant solely to shelter and quarantine you from the outside world; and this revelation thunders through your existence after your bowl is upended and you fall downward into an endless expanse of ocean, in which you are expected to find a coral reef located somewhere in the water’s vast abyss, and that coral reef becomes your new home, a place you must adapt to by carving out a niche for yourself, so that you may be useful and productive and ultimately thrive in this strange setting, your new home, in a coral reef, to be found somewhere in the endless expanse of ocean water. That’s sorta what I think it feels like graduating college.

Anyway

What I hope this blog achieves can be broken down into three buckets: short-term, medium-term, and long-term. Short-term, I hope to make this a semi-professional product with a sleek design and regular postings of interesting stories. Medium-term, I want to hit 5,000 readers and be able to travel outside the Midwest to interview and tell stories of people living elsewhere in America. Finally, long-term, it’d be dope to hit 50,000 readers and to write full-time, or get co-opted by a bigger institution than just me writing a blog only friends and family will read.

SO, if you are reading this, it means that you are on the ground floor of what could be a really tall building; think, like, Giza Pyramids big. But, as with every pyramid scheme, I need your help building it! Therefore it would be super cool of you to like and share and subscribe, because I want to make a gigantic pyramid, and I need your help to build it, so I’ll even pay you for liking, sharing, and subscribing, because everyone wins in a good pyramid scheme.

That’s all.