I love my job.

I get up in the morning, get in my gas-hogging SUV and drive to the gym (except when I don't), step-master to Pet Shop Boys for about 30 hellish minutes, take a shower with a bunch of guys, go to breakfast either at my east-side office (The J&M Cafe) or at my office in the West Hills (that being my home), then I brew up a frothy over-the-top coffee concoction, and voilà—just like that my day has officially begun. So, I guess you could say that I "require" about two and a half hours to start my day, counting breakfast. Well, that's not really true because I usually work through breakfast, but I'm fudging here a bit just to make a point: Jeesus I have a good life! I love being a writer!

But that's not why I decided to begin this, here, my very own blog. After all, who really wants to read about someone's very happy life. I suppose I could write about crack babies, incest, crystal meth and sex parties, maybe a little name dropping and Euro snobbery or something like that to really get the postmodern juices flowing, the kind of thing that just about everyone else is addicted to writing about these days. But no thanks. Not here. Not on this blog, and not in this lifetime. Not only am I a writer who believes in writing stuff that people can understand—weird, huh?—but I also believe in writing stuff that makes people want to cheer. Happiness is cool in my world, and if you're not cool with that then you won't think that I'm cool, which is cool. Groovy?

Anyway, I plan to use this space to keep tabs on myself. I've been noticing recently that no one has been officially managing my life, so I'm just going to have to do it myself. That means cracking the whip, and I just thought that having a blog might give me some kind of structure for recording my progress.

But wait, there's more: I just realized that as sexy as the word blog might be right now (is that even possible?), in the end a blog is just an online journal, and I have always hated the idea of a journal. It just seems so pointless:

"1/25/05 Today my shitzu named Pamelia started sneezing. It was really gross. I should take her to the vet.
1/26/05 Today I learned that my shitzu has asthma, and I will have to give her a nasal spray three times a day for the rest of her pitiful life..."

To prevent a slide down that slippery slope, me and my mind manager have agreed to limit this blog to all things writerly, or at least tangentially writerly, which is necessarily writerly because no one but a writer would ever say tangentially.