Hooray, hooray! It's (not) April Opening Fools' Day!

(Illustration courtesy of Fresh Doodle)

So yesterday was the first full day of the Major League Baseball season, and I had planned on writing a big shabang about how much I love Opening Day, and how it's 12 straight hours of wall-to-wall baseball after it's been out of your life for six months, and how when I was younger I would make it a tradition to skip school on Opening Day and consume as much baseball as humanly possible from my living room couch.

I was going to write about this yesterday... but then I got lazy and I didn't do it. That's the thing about blogging -- it's a thankless, grating task that can very easily burn you out if you're not totally into what you're writing about. Forcing yourself to write about something, or writing out of a sense of obligation, is a dreadful exercise, and when bloggers do it, it's usually followed by them rediscovering the outside world and abandoning the blog completely. It's why all blogs have a life span -- and by all, I mean the ones not raking in oodles of visitors like Deadspin, that have a whole staff and crap.

In a way, blogs are like bands. They start out purely as a hobby, with the writer pumping out new content every few days. And they get a small following, and they decide to keep the site going. In fact, they maintain the blog so long that you look at the archive box on the side of the page and you go, "Damn, they've been doing this for that long?" But then... real life starts to creep in. The writer gets a girlfriend (or a boyfriend), or they start to work long hours, or they start taking classes, or they just rediscover how much fun it is to interact with people who don't go by names like "Dantex777" or "xbxpwn2714." Suddenly, the blog isn't a fun little distraction anymore. It's a chore, and the moment that mindset enters the mind of the writer, it's all over, Johnny.

The inevitable decline begins innocently enough. The number of posts coming out of the blog drops significantly, but the writer insists they're still committed to blogging -- even though it'll now require squeezing it into their schedule. "I just started a job making boxes at a box factory," the blogger might write, "and I've been extremely busy."

And then there's a huge drop-off. All of a sudden, the blog goes completely inactive. There's like a two month lull where the blog doesn't produce a single post before, out of nowhere, the writer makes a triumphant return. History tells us that the first thing the writer will do is apologize to their followers/readers/whatever you want to call people who read blogs. It's the justification post (I've made it myself a few times), and it goes something like this: "Hey guys, I'm sorry that I haven't written anything for a while. Things have just been really hectic here; they're creating a new box at my job, and I had to work overtime. Also, my wife is pregnant and we're living out of a trailer park. But I haven't forgotten about you guys! Again, I'm sorry for not keeping you guys up to speed, but I'm going to make an effort to write regularly again from this point on!"

The writer will then keep true to their word. For a few weeks, or maybe even a month or two, the blog goes right back to producing regular content. But there's something different about it. There's a palpable difference in the writing. You can't quite put your finger on it, but you're certain that the writer isn't as into it as they once were.

Then... without any warning... the blog dies a sudden death. It dies without any warning or farewells or anything. The last post is something random like "How To Wash Your Cat Without It Clawing Your Face Off." At first you're not quite sure if it's dead. You go to it and you see that it hasn't been updated in a week. Then two weeks. Then three weeks. Then three months. Eventually, it's been so long that you realize that the writer is never coming back, and that the post about the cat will serve as its tombstone.

There's probably an industry term for blog-abandonment, but it's much easier to describe what the writer has done with the use of expletives. Quite simply, they woke up one day, went "Ah, fuck it," and left the blog in the dust. The writer has either become so burned out or so disillusioned or bored by the process that they no longer care what their followers or readers think. So, in a spontaneous act of "Ah, fuck it," they let the blog die a sudden, ungraceful death.

I'm sure we can all think of a blog or two that followed this life cycle. I want Reetae.com to avoid that ignominious fate, and if that means not writing about something for no other reason than that I was lazy, so be it. I don't want Reetae.com to follow the path of yoursecretissafewithme.blogspot.com, which was going fine until February 6, 2008, when the writer suddenly went "Ah, fuck it" and left it in the dust.

So anyway, that's my recap of why I'm not writing about what I thought I was going to be writing about -- in case any of you are mind readers. If nothing else, this post gives me an excuse to use an awesome illustration of the Joker from Fresh Doodle, since yesterday was also April Fools' Day. Fools, clowns, the Joker. It all makes sense when you think about it.