I used to keep a blog, it started in a hospital bed after I fell out of a tree. A few years of regular journaling gave me a nice sense of satisfaction. It was so much fun that it eventually got me my first copywriting job.

Around that time, I ended up living on the Southbay Strand during a memoir of a year in the LA surf town of El Porto, where I first learned about California’s “squatters rights.” Following that, I vlogged some #shedlife from my uncle’s barn down in OC. Fun, but not writing, so the blog just sort of hung there, collecting internet dust (cookies?) for a while.

I looked back at the blog a few times, but my mechanics of WordPress were slipping. All of a sudden, with everyone living on smartphones, we were cruising way faster than the days for I started the blog to begin with. I think that’s what makes podcasting so much fun; one-click access to a whole new voice, without any grammatical editing or the visual barriers you find in vlogging.

Even if I did have a nice blog, that’s still an exit off the social media superhighway. Long live “the information superhighway,” you were great while you lasted. Convenient as it is to find to someone on Facebook, it frustrates me that social media has simultaneously crammed so much more internet into our faces at the same time that we are absolutely oversaturated.

To take back my corner of the web, my little sandcastle on the cloud, I am repurposing the blog here, in my profile pictures. If you are on my Facebook page then you probably want to know about me, so here it will go. I will be sure to include a few red herrings like back in Montana middle school, to throw the creepers off my trail.

It’s hard not to feel mild guilt for scrolling past a long post in your Facebook feed, especially a topic from friend you’re actually interested in, but simply don’t have the time to stop and read. Well, these ones are parked front and center, not going anywhere. Just like a blog. Like a squatter.

Facebook, you are obviously reading this too; why not code a blogging component into your interface? It’s one of the last universal things missing on the platform and it may inject some humanity back into a tool that we once had much more fun with before. It’s unfortunate that you can’t checkpoint a post’s read-through progression, as I doubt half of you who finish this will do it in one straight shot, and I think that more than half who don’t complete it will get less than half as far as they’d expected.

Photo outside the American Film Market, 2018.