Delacour Rapprochement

Glad to see Delacour back. Jonathon has written a great post about many things, but I was interested in the "quit drinking" aspect to be sure and the other idea of being far away from other bloggers.

He finds that quitting drinking did not INCREASE his blogging, but au contraire, decreased it. Since I've lately been in a "quit drinking" mode for the most part, I haven't noticed it making me blog more or less. I never drank enough to make a difference and almost never blogged when I drank anyway. I only tend to drink when I'm not at home and I tend to blog when I AM at home. Here's Jonathan's thoughts on the subject:

"Contrary to expectation, drastically reducing my consumption of alcohol triggered a corresponding decline in my weblog output: my previous post was a couple of months ago, at exactly the time I decided to drink less. I stopped doing other things too—watching television in mid-December and drinking coffee in early February—but the connection between blogging and alcohol seems too strong to ignore.

I wasn’t even a particularly heavy drinker. A beer and a couple of glasses of wine or a couple of beers and a glass of wine is as much as I ever feel like drinking. Over dinner recently, when I told my friend Willem that I’d started on a plan to drink less, he said: “But you never drank much anyway.” It wasn’t the quantity that bothered me as much as the regularity. Drinking was a habit, like watching television had been, and I was curious about whether I could break another habit as easily."

One of the things he mentions is how he and Stavros The WonderChicken live far away from some of us bloggers who hang out in Boston, SF, NY. I was very interested in that, just thinking about it the other day, not in terms of living near bloggers, but rather, thinking about how few people you see in any given day and our lives are lived -- even in this jet-set world -- in very local ways. If your local neighborhood includes Harvard University or Times Square or The Golden Gate Bridge, you do have a different "local" experience over a lifetime which some may call elite, but this is where we live. I don't know if I want to apologize for it, but as I mentioned in my post "The Star You Are" it's disingenuous to pretend it's not part of the game here.

I want be a writer when I grow up. It's not easy to make a living being a writer. It's easier to get paid to write if people know who the hell you are. I do want people to know who the hell I am, because I want them to read what I write. I want to be paid for what I write. I guess if that is the sin I commit, I have to say "guilty as charged." I never came to blogging as a programmer or developer or entrepreneur per se. I came to blogging as a writer. Did I come to blogging to become a famous writer? No, I think I came to blogging just to write.

So Jonathon listen, if you blog more when you drink, I'm sending you some booze, because you're a great writer. And you're never far from us (just like WonderChicken) when you're whispering in our ears, half way across the world and a few oceans away, we don't miss a word.