When the Term "Blog" Feels Like an Insult

It's like telling an actor you enjoy his 'little shows'

I started my first blog (short for 'weblog') back in 2005. An Angry White Guy in Chicago was my response to being an all-around bad playwright but feeling the compulsion to write nonetheless. The all-seeing, all-knowing Joe told me to write every day, about anything, except plays because he recognized how terrible my plays were.

I tried journaling— a high-minded word for keeping a diary—but without the accountability of someone else reading it and perhaps responding, it didn't take. Thus the blogspot blog. At the time, there weren't that many of us out there. There was no iPhone yet and Faceborg was in its nascent stages so there was room for the odd cat writing about the world.

The name came to me as a joke. In 2006, most people associated an angry white guy as conservative and, while I was both angry and white, the axe I ground was firmly on the side of the liberal. I wrote long screeds about George W. and the arch-enemy of all things good, Dick Cheney. I was so vehement in my disgust for Dick, I was put on a no-fly list for making a joke about bitch-slapping him and it was flagged as a threat.

I wrote theater reviews. I wrote about things in the news cycle. It was punchy and rude and not particularly well-written but honest and, well, angry. By 2009, I had approximately 60,000 pageviews a month and was feeling like a badass. Those early days of blogging felt more like extended conversations—we even coined a name for it, the Theatrosphere—and theater folk from all over the world commented on things I wrote and I commented back and there were long threads of intellectual discourse (and some ad hominem attacking) almost every day.

Then I started dating (and eventually living with) a far-left social justice activist whose godfather was none other than Bill Ayers. She hated the name of the blog because, well, racism I suppose. Declaring you were white and angry was her version of a dog whistle to the world with no regard to the dogmatic pro-choice, universal healthcare, pro-gay stances online. So, due to the fact that I didn't want to hear her complain about it non-stop and I really liked having sex, I changed it to AWG in Chicago and she calmed down about it.

By then the iPhone had gained in significance and social media (Faceborg and Twitter) started to sap the steam behind the cotton gin of blogging. The commentary for the writing shifted from the blog to social media which, in turn, became more ad hominem, less intellectual discourse. By 2012, Medium and ThoughtCatalog had begun aggregating bloggers, monetizing the more well-known writers, and the blogspot blog was a fading memory. I switched it up, bought a SquareSpace domain, and shifted to the donhallchicago website with my blog as a part of that.

By 2016, two occurrences changed it up again. First, the upper management at WBEZ had changed and with it, the company's blind eye to the title of the blog. Second, Trump was nominated as the GOP presidential candidate and the joke of the angry white guy became less funny. David Himmel pitched a digital magazine around that time so I bought a new domain, created said magazine, named it Literate Ape, and we recruited some local writers to contribute.

Did it end up being a blog? I don't know but as the writing improved and the scope became less my pet peeves and more substantive, I'd like to think it transcended the category.

Consequently, whenever someone refers to my blog, I tend to bristle some. It feels like when I was making a living performing improvised comedy and producing Off Loop theater when someone would ask "How are your skits going?" Skits? The amount of energy and labor to mount those skits was often far more than someone working a 9-to-5 but calling them skits felt like a dig, a minimization of all that went into creating those entertainment experiences.

Blogging by any other name is probably still blogging. Being precious about it is likewise just being precious. What do I care what you call it? Blogging has developed into a skill in writing that I would never have garnered any other way. Because of my obsession with writing things for the interest of others I’ve published eight books with two more coming this year.

I also have this SubStack which is just blogging on a different platform, isn’t it?

As the Fourth Estate continues to be assailed by ridiculous amounts of layoffs attributed to both the economy and an almost pathological distrust by consumers and trends that people are getting their news from TikTok in the form of short videos, the written word is getting its ass kicked. The publishing industry is limited to only printing books from established authors which presents a lot less risk for less reward.

Currently, I work for a series of terrestrial radio stations in Kansas and still write nearly every day for either this platform, LiterateApe.com, or for books I’m going to complete and publish. I might as well start a side hustle as a guy who repairs pocket watches or builds wagon wheels. Just call me Don “Marconi” Hall as my next big venture will in be telegraph machines.

What I do know is that all greatest writers (or at least those whom I idolize) started out writing to write with no agenda beyond the act of writing. Making money writing was not really in their plan and because they simply would not stop, eventually we all started reading them. Would Bukowski or Angelou blog if it was available to them? Probably. I once asked Henry Rollins if he’d had Amazon Self Publishing available to him when he started publishing his own books, would he go that way and he smiled. “Damn right I would. Printing your own books is a real pain in the ass.”

As always, thank you for bothering to read in the first place and a double thank you for bothering to read anything I write. You’re like a whole bunch of people looking on at my addiction to meth and saying “Hey. You do you. We appreciate your drugged out ranting and sepia-toned teeth. Keep it up, addict!”

I think I will even if you call it blogging.