Why We Write

I feel like we keep it pretty real around here. Neither Darwin nor I has an internet persona; we write as we are. We've been around for six years, and long-time readers have a pretty good grasp of our personalities, enough so that any time we've met internet friends in person we've hit it off instantly. On a lark, I pulled up Darwin's first post on the blog, and reads much like something we would write now, albeit we're no longer under thirty and have more than two children now.

So I was surprised by a recent commenter's suggestion that posting something was "out of character". If I've posted it, it's in my character to do so, n'est pas? We've always treated the blog as a self-published magazine, and fill it with articles about what interests us at the moment. We have no overarching agenda, whether political, evangelical, or cultural, and we write to please ourselves. As a result, almost no topic is off-limits, and very few filters apply. We are as we post.

However, because we blog candidly doesn't mean that the topics don't shift over time. Darwin, to give an example, used to write extensively on evolution, but that subject has been covered here; the discussions have been had several times, the same objections answered over and over again. Time to move on. As I scanned the past several months' worth of posts to see what impression we might make on a new reader, I realized that a) Darwin does most of the heavy lifting, anymore, because I'm too lazy to sit down and pound out a post most of the time (ask him how many times recently I've said, "I should write about that," and then didn't get around to it), and b) all the fun personal stuff has migrated off to Facebook, where people know us well enough that they ought to expect quotes from Tropic Thunder, and incessant kid anecdotes, and dumb homeschooling failure complaints, and articles about beer for breakfast and Youtube videos of hip-hop economists and rapping tea aficionados, and pleas for someone to buy my dad's house (again).

And that's a loss. Because although we do discuss everything we write about (that's why I don't have to read Darwin's stuff about money theory, RL: I hear about it enough in person), that's not all we talk about, not by a long shot. We also sit around at nights yakking about why The Horse And His Boy should be made with Bollywood stars playing the Calormenes, and the boy down the street who was trying to hit our power lines with a garden hoe, and how even in my dreams Darwin manifests a mastery of markets and pricing strategies, and whether men who follow game theory are pimping mac daddies or just lame, and occasionally laughing ourselves stupid over Samuel L. Jackson declaring, "That's it! I have HAD it with these motherf---ing snakes on a motherf---ing plane!" We don't always have to share it, but don't be surprised if we do.