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Bliss | Nov 02 2001

Many years back, during a crisis of direction and meaning and whatnot, one of several such crises in my life, all of which have coincided with the end of a relationship, I decided to publish my own journal. Or this, I decided, was what would end my crisis. I think I was inspired by The Sun. My journal was going to be like The Sun, only better, because it would have more stuff that interested me. This was my idea: to publish a journal consisting entirely of things that interested me.

Another model was Poor Richard’s Almanac, which I’d never read and still haven’t, but which I imagined to be an annual collection of things that interested Benjamin Franklin.

Frankly, at this time I may have been reading one of those books that purport to help one figure out what the fuck to do with oneself, and it may have been this book that gave me the notion to, er, follow my bliss.

However, I didn’t follow my bliss very far and soon abandoned the project. I mention it now because I thought at the time (this was before the Internet and before zines hit) that if done well, it would work, that a person would be revealed in the seemingly unrelated things he liked. It would be a self-portrait, of a kind, one that would deepen as the reader made connections, saw patterns, and began, inevitably, to grow accustomed to me and my shit.

I am not one of those who believe that everyone has a story to tell. Or, no, I do believe this, I believe it with all my heart; I just don’t believe everyone capable of making that story seem interesting. This is why there are writers; writers have a way of making stories seem interesting.

How writers do this, I do not know, nor particularly care to know, and anyway that’s not what I was talking about. What I was talking about, or at least leading up to talking about, is the fact that this site has evolved into the very thing I once dreamed of making: a journal of things that interest me. I refer chiefly to the right-hand column of the homepage, which consists of links to things I like. Such links are common on personal sites, but I have chosen to present them in a more expanded, magazine-like fashion, in an effort, not entirely unconscious, to transform Oblivio into, well, something more like a magazine. But not a magazine. Like a what, then?

Like Poor Richard’s Almanac, only without the homespun quotes and without all that annoying, you know, Benjamin Franklinness.