The rebirth of the great American living room blog

This blogpost was made in my living room and I’m pretty proud of it. A lot of things aren’t made anywhere close to home, let alone in the country or any other room in the house for that matter. I think there was a movement at one time to outsource blogs. The rumor was that good old-fashioned American blogs were being offshored to Pacific Rim outposts. That was perhaps then. Today, I am here to tell you about the resurgence of the American, living room blog.

The American living room blog was on life support as recently as a few years ago. People were doing edgy things like writing their posts from their bedrooms. Sometimes they even wrote from their bathrooms. Other times they wrote from their home offices or basements. Sometimes they wrote from home offices in their basements.

All of these locales paled in comparison to the great content that could only be had and generated in one’s living room. Living rooms have the best mix of television distractions and other people and animals in the room at the same time. Contrary to conventional wisdom, distractions are healthy when it comes to writing good blogs. I know this sounds crazy, but personally I seek out the most distractions I can find when I write so that my ridiculous style can truly shine through.

Take for instance tonight for example. My wife is simultaneously frequenting the den that doubles as a home office to do some work on the computer while she has the television frozen at some point during the Westminster Dog Show. Some woman is holding a Pomeranian with a microphone in her hand and her mouth is wide open. She looks like she is forming the word, “Oh.” Now, ordinarily you wouldn’t notice things like this if you watched the Dog Show in real time. It would be something less distracting in fact, which as stated earlier, is not at all what I am looking for in terms of having my focus torn in several different directions at once.

I think being heavily distracted while one writes is akin to multi-tasking. This motivational guru remnant of the 90’s, you know the kind you read about in self-help best sellers sporting titles like, “Nine Gazillion Things Mediocre People Do Before 6 a.m.,” is making a comeback of its own. Because computers were heralded as devices that would make our lives easier (but drive us to hell in the process), multi-tasking has once again become necessary because people have more work to do than is possible.
Work-life balance on the other hand has been thrown out as undesirable, as in order to get the work done employees have to develop repetitive stress injuries as evidence they are doing it “right.” It’s too bad that multi-tasking is being “stressed” again. More work may be getting done by multi-tasking, but to be more specific, it is more half-assed work that is being completed.

People would similarly argue with me that my being distracted takes away from the quality of my writing. I say no way, Jose. You’d think I’d go off on tangents, pursuing a multitude of directions as I journey to the center of mediocrity. But I say no, again, to all of these protests. To the contrary once more, I suggest my writing is that much more interesting in its distracted form. Distracted writing caters to short attention spans—something we have never been in short supply of and something that is as prevalent today as it ever has been.
So now the whippet has made an appearance on the Dog Show. The crowd goes wild and everyone realizes that no one will remember the whippet once the beagle comes romping through next. The Dog Show is especially tuned to short attention spans, also, and is a match made in heaven for bloggers like me who know the living room is where it’s at for quality writing and creativity intended for no one specific audience whatsoever.

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