As with all dubious enterprises, we should begin with a disclaimer.

Trouble is, disclaimers are a lot like manifestos, and we get all tangled up in self-imposed restrictions and constraints, before we’ve even got started. This is antethical to the way life really is: we are cast naked into the world with no agendas, no mission statements, no training.

For a brief moment, we are ahistorical beings, living without a past; the endless future engulfs us, so huge that we cannot perceive it. Only the present is livable in, and we must live on our wits—except we don’t really have those yet either. So we throw up our hands and say, “I can’t handle this. You lot deal with things till I’m older.”

In conclusion: I’m going to get on with it, and worry about things like why I’m doing it, what my aims are, and other vague questions of this nature, at some later date. In the interests of being upfront, I have a few other concerns about this post that I’m going to briefly mention.

When someone begins a blog, they are—unless they happen to be a well-known figure of some kind, or for some other reason have a reasonably large audience in place before they write a single word—placed in the slightly strange position of writing their first post for posterity. With no readers, the author must compose their first post as a greeting to an as-yet nonexistent entity. People find many solutions. Some simply ignore the problem, and dive straight into writing about the mating habits of South American tree frogs, or best practice in tax form design, or what Mary said to Ted at Dave and Annabel’s wedding. Others bite the bullet, and write an introductory post of some kind or another.

An unanswered question is still hovering over this decision: why is it important? If no one will read it when one posts it, why bother? Why not just start writing about whatever it is one writes about? The answer is, roughly, “people read first posts”. Not now, of course, but sooner or later if people (even if it’s only five of them) start reading a blog regularly, then eventually people will look back to see what the first post said. Assuming that my habits are even vaguely indicative of the mores of the blog-reading public, here’s my rationale for why this will happen: people like to know who they’re dealing with. Who is this character, and why are they writing about shelf-stacking in Indonesian supermarkets?

Of course, there’s always the “About” page, but that tends to be a block of fairly up-to-date information about the person; it sits, in a sense, outside the temporal flow implicit in a stream of posts ordered by the point in time they were posted in. A first post is different—it’s first. It tells the reader (usually) why the blog exists: what was running through the author’s head when they started writing, and the editorial direction they thought it would take.

In my experience, these predictions about what people are going to write about are invariably wrong. The ideas people have about where they think they’re going tend to (probably necessarily) be one-dimensional. Life, and by extension blogging, have far more texture than our plans ever anticipate. Consequently, when someone says “In this blog I intend to write about X, Y, and occasionally Z” you know they’re never going to stick to it. People with a pragmatic bent don’t expect to; their plan is just that, a plan, a guideline to the future. People like me, on the other hand, make posts like these.

I have no idea whether or not this is going to be a “wild ride”, but buckle your seatbelts, just in case. After all, you never know when your best friend is going to decide to drive the car into a tree.