Humility Swim by Black Pearl 10When I posted this article about Tony Pierce and Shane Nickerson. I had no idea what the fuck I was starting when I posted it. I had about five constant readers at that time, having recently converted my hard coded site to a blogging platform on Blogger. I got to Shane’s site from reading Wil Wheaton’s site because everyone starting out in blogging in ‘05 was riding Wil’s jock because he was the quintessential face of blogging. Wil plugged Shane’s site one day as one written by a good writer and a friend of his, so I clicked through. I found Shane’s writing to be personable and interesting and I continue to read his stuff to this day.

And Shane introduced me to Tony Pierce’s busblog, an LA Blogger dubbed “The Blogfather” because of where he took blogging. In some ways, Tony is the Jimi Hendrix of blogging because he approached it with a creative and open style that at times hit both the sacred and the profane. Tony still writes on the busblog but he’s been hired as editor of the online LA blog site LAist which I don’t read but if I lived in LA probably would.

So, at the time, I was having difficulty defining the culture of my blog and my writing style. I read a lot of political blogs and, still in the afterglow (or aftershock depending on your POV) of the 2004 election in which my state swung the dong to Bush’s right leg. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a political pundit or write short stories and poems, maybe a little of both. I wasn’t sure how much of myself I wanted to put online, something I continue to struggle with. But one thing I was sure of–that while these guys were writing good stuff, I felt that with their audience they should be writing more things that mattered to the world.

Looking back on the post in hindsight, it was pretty naive of me to write that because I couldn’t tell you today what matters to the world and fuck me for trying to define what should matter to other people. Maybe it was jealousy, some sour grapes, maybe I just wanted to rub some right wing salt into the wounds of some Left Coast lefties–either way, I had no idea that Shane and Tony would both read the post and start responding and that it would grow into a blog war. Me and my big fucking mouth didn’t help the situation either. I even apologized but did so as a lose the battle to win the war type gesture. That was one of the most stressful few days I’ve ever had online and I learned a valuable lesson about aggression in writing online.

Exchanging ideas and viewpoints online isn’t a steel cage match. Ideas aren’t matter and anti-matter. What’s the old saying about intelligence being about holding two contrasting ideas in your mind at the same time and recognizing both to be correct? It’s true. It turns out that Shane and Tony were mostly right about George W. Bush. It wasn’t fair of me to target them and I haven’t attacked a blogger since then because it’s a little like shitting where you eat.

Two years have gone by and the man that writes this post is laughing at the man who wrote that post. Read Tony Pierce. Read Shane Nickerson. They’re good and they have my seal of approval along with an apology and the last mention I’ll ever make of the matter.

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