Yes, I am starting a blog

I have an admission to make. I hate the internet.

Now I'm not trying to be a crotchety old malcontent who mutters on and on about how technology ruins culture. This is a blog. It is intended to be a place of undiluted self-importance. I don't hate the internet for what it does to society, or to other people, or to those kids today who text each other when they're sitting together on the bus. I hate the internet because of what it does to me.

I can't sit down and write. I can't have a conversation with someone without thinking about an email conversation I'm in the middle of. For Christ's sake, I can't even sit down and read a book anymore. To test this, yesterday, as I was reading one of the best books I've read in a long time (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, if you're curious), I counted the number of times I checked my email during a three hour reading session. The number: 14.

This is not because the book bored me. In fact, I was in love with the book. I couldn't put it down. But I also happened to be in the midst of some administrative, bureaucratic bullshit, the details of which I won't bore you with, and the internet forced me to think about what I wasn't enjoying obsessively while ignoring what I was enjoying right in front of me. It's the technological equivalent of being 13 and able to call that girl you like as many times as you want without scaring her away or pissing off her mom.

The problem, I think, is that the internet is changing my brain. A UCLA scientist named Gary Small says that brain activity shifts dramatically and quickly when non-Internet users start to use. I've been using it for a long time. And a guy named Nicholas Carr argued in an interview with The Sun that the internet may be turning us all into a distracted mass of humanity that lacks "depth of knowledge." (He also, for the record, says it is making us increasingly efficient at processing knowledge.) He may be overstating his case and overgeneralizing. I don't know. But for me, I can say unequivocally that he knows what the fuck he's talking about.

It is tempting to blame the internet for everything wrong with my life. And I really want to. I hate it. I want it out of my life. I wish I could give it a long, long noogie until it went away for awhile, like an annoying younger brother. I wish I could run into it in a dark alley and, as my girlfriend says, "stab it in the goiter." I wish I could steal its kidneys and sell them on the black market. I wish I could put it in one of those James Bond death machines where the internet is held above a shark tank while acid slowly eats away at the ropes that are keeping it balanced precariously above a snapping Great White.

But in the end, I have to admit to myself that the internet is a thing, not a living creature, and I have to treat it as such. Therefore, I must blame myself. The easiest solution would be to stop using the internet entirely. Unfortunately, I can't. A writer who does not use the internet is like a dictator who doesn't use violence. It just doesn't work.

So instead of obsessively checking my email, I'm going to obsessively write blog entries. I'm going to use all of this obsessiveness to my advantage, to practice doing what I love: writing. So that's what I'm going to do. Now hold me to it.