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Add one part satire to two parts sincerity. Sprinkle on a couple of rants. Stir liberally.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
If it's called Daily Blah, how come you don't ... hey, wait, you're writing every day!
See? Told you I'd try harder.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
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Daily Blah for... Tuesday, December 10, 2002
On Loss
There's a little-known song by the Divine Comedy that I love, called Lost Property. Most of the lyrics are a simple litany of stuff that has at one time or another found its way out of the possession of the lead singer, Neil Hannon: two tennis rackets. New sheepskin jacket. Blue Rizla packets. It's a sad, subtle hymn to a hard truth that we rarely like to recognize: that when personal effects decide to leave us, be they profound or petty items, we often have a difficult time coping. We go through the stages of grief. We long to see them all again. Which is exactly what Hannon does at the end of the song, in a dream, all piled up into the sky/and I cry/tears of joy.
Since the weekend, I've been going through these inexplicably real stages of grief about some things I will never see again -- and they were only ever composed of electrons in the first place. A dastardly piece of shareware I downloaded, called Deja Vu, that promised to synchronize folders of my writings across my Macintoshes, instead deleted a bunch of them. Everything I've written on my G4 Cube since July, in fact. Diaries. Chapters of novels. And the hardest-felt lost: in-depth accounts of those first few dates with my girlfriend, Petra. Gone, gone, gone, irretrievably gone. I've spent a couple of days learning the harsh fact that there is no way in hell, under the new Mac OS X, to undelete them. It's possible that some of the raw text is still there, buried deep in the bowels of the Unix operating system. But not even my geekiest friends have any idea how to get at it. How much that fact stings, how impossible it has been to get closure on the loss! It's as if I have a bunch of kids buried at the bottom of a deep mine shaft, almost certainly dead, probably dismembered, but no one knows how to get their bodies to the surface.
I'm a lucky man, I believe, in that I've had to suffer relatively few losses of people close to me in my life (two grandmothers, one friend who died of cancer at a heartbreakingly young age). Grief over lost stuff is nothing next to that. But it's real, nonetheless. The sooner we learn to accept this -- like Hannon did -- the better. It's just part of our pathetically human makeup to get emotional about inanimate objects. And electrons.
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