Like a lot of men (and women too) I enjoy watching home improvement programs on TV. As a homeowner I always have a long list of projects on my “To Do” list. And most of them I plan on doing myself. (Sometimes friends even have me do projects on their homes!) So I have a good reason for being interested in home improvement programs.

But there are a lot of avid watchers who, I suspect, have little intention of doing anything to their own home more challenging than change light bulbs. They watch for the vicarious thrill of seeing someone else turn a dull, dysfunctional kitchen into an modern, ergonomic miracle, or transform an eyesore of a yard into the envy of the neighborhood.

I’ll admit, it is a very satisfying experience to look back a half hour or so and remember the ugly chaos that has now been transformed into a thing of beauty. And yet, I never feel completely satisfied.

One day I was watching “This Old House” I think it was, and I became aware of a vague sense of inadequacy. I knew that I would never be as good as Bob Villa, that my projects would never go as smoothly or quickly as his. I know from my own experiences that there were probably little problems that Bob failed to mention, steps he glossed over, mistakes that were edited out. I always encounter challenges that Bob never has to deal with. I like to think I am a capable and careful craftsman, but watching Bob made me feel that when it came to home improvement I was nothing more than an amateur, a Bob Villa wanna-be.

Sure, seeing Bob do something I hadn’t seen before still made me want to go try it. And even as I realized that he probably wasn’t as good as the TV program made him seem, I really admired the guy. (It wasn’t just tool envy, but there was that.) I couldn’t really explain why I felt the way I did about not only Bob Villa but all the other home improvement shows and their stars.

As I recognized the conflicting emotions of excitement and inadequacy the home improvement programs generated in me, I realized that the shows were not just “infotainment” but pornography.

Just as traditional porn portrays sex in an unrealistic, fantasized way, the stars of home improvement shows create a false impression of what it really takes to do these projects. They make it look easy; they’ve always got the right tools, everything turns out perfectly. And they do it all without getting dirty. How can real people compete with that?

(I guess that makes Bob Villa a porn star. Mmmm...plaid. At least you can trust him to know how long eight inches is.)

In a way it was a relief to realize I was watching home improvement porn. I can just sit back and enjoy it. I know that when I try something I saw Bob Villa or one of the others do I won’t be able to do it nearly as well. I’ll do the best I can, and it will have to do. Now if I can just explain this to my wife.

To blog or not to blog, that is the question, as you-know-who might have said (but didn’t). After some serious thought my response is, yeah, why not?

Please forgive the literary reference in the very first sentence. It isn’t that I am trying to set the tone for what follows—fat chance. But living just a few miles from the Shakespeare Theater in Ashland, Oregon, quoting William is nearly irresistible. (And yes, that is a dangling participle. I’m afraid the tone of this blog is already ruined.)

It seemed to me that one would start something like this with a few assumptions, such as that one knows something worth writing about, and that others might find what one writes worth reading. But in a haphazard yet extensive review of other blogs being published on the web, I found such not to be the case.

Oh sure, there are probably hundreds of entertaining and informative blogs out there. (I’ve posted links to a few on the right side of this page.) But believe me, there are thousands which, if they were ailing patients, would be prime candidates for euthanasia. In doing research for this paragraph I read that there are an estimated 34.5 million blogs on the internet. Numbers are not my strong point—I’m more of a word person—but that is a lot. I’m not sure what precious natural resources these things are wasting, but really people, we’re gonna run out.

Let me say here, early on, that I find the term “blog” to be, well, shall we say, ungraceful. According to “Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia”, the term “weblog” was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger, editor of an early blog called “Robot Wisdom.” In the spring of 1999 another early blogger (another ungraceful permutation) named Peter Merholz cleverly broke “weblog” into two words—“we blog”—thus turning a noun into a declarative sentence, for any grammarians still with me. “Blog” became a verb and is now conjugated in all sorts of unnatural ways.

So, picking up where I left off, I was talking about some of the other blogs out there—which in the blogging world is called “navel gazing,” a pejorative reference to meditators who spend their time contemplating themselves, though probably not their navel specifically. For that metaphor to make sense one has to imagine the entire “blogosphere” (I'm not making that up) contemplating itself like a giant Buddha. Other metaphors compare bloggers to citizens of the country of "Blogistan." It's linguistic chaos out there. Where are the language police when you need them?

Some bloggers refer to other bloggers quite a bit, and link to other blogs (see my list in the sidebar to the right. Out of the 34.5 million other people who have a blog, I actually know one of them. If I can figure out how to link to his blog, I will)

But most just talk about themselves. I’ve read some blogs where, after just a few paragraphs I knew way more than I wanted to about the author. Thoreau said “I would not talk so much about myself if there were anyone else whom I knew as well.” (I only promised not to quote Shakespeare.) I suspect that if Thoreau had read some of the blogs out there now he would amend his statement to point out that sometimes there are reasons one shouldn’t talk about oneself at all, much less anything else.

I don’t really know what I am going to be writing about in this blog. Obviously I can carry on quite a bit with very little information.

I also don’t know how often I will be posting new entries. Jorn Barger—remember, he’s the guy credited with coining the term “weblog” –said “The more interesting your life becomes, the less you post...and vice versa.” We’ll see...