Back in the old days, when Gawker was new and your mom didn’t believe that “blog” was actually a real word, somebody once said (approximately): If you wish to be linked to by other blogs, blog about blogging. (I’m sorry, I can’t remember who said it, but maybe someone out there does. Answers on a post card, please.) I don’t know if this old saw was what the New York Times had in mind when they went on a tear about abandoned blogs, but it might as well have been.

It’s gotten a lot of play, that article – just, as I suspect, it was intended to. So, damn me for linking to it. Queue the jokes about the timeliness of the piece. (Blogs are so 2002!) Queue also the unasked for justifications from bloggers who somehow beat the odds and manage to keep blogging. Further, queue the celebratory backslapping from those same odds-beaters.

Still, an article like the one mentioned above seems to cry out not simply for individual justifications of individual blogs, but for a spirited defense of blogging as a form in and of itself; an explanation of why so many people blog even when they know that nobody’s reading. My own personal experience may be useless, here: I’ve had a website of one form or another since 1999. At this point, having my own URL is a little like having an email address or a phone number – it’s a habit now, I suppose.

I’ve always felt compelled to talk about the things that I want to talk about, whether anybody was listening or not. It’s what makes me a bad person and a crashing bore in social situations. I could claim that using this blog as a venue for some occasional, harmless spleen-venting bleeds off the worst excesses of this particular personality disorder, but actually, no. It does not.

So what’s the point of blogging? Why do I do it? I feel like the New York Times has laid down the gauntlet. It’s time for this blogger to justify his existence. Well, you’re not going to get any of that from me. Every day this blog exists is a slap in the face of decency, good sense, proper spelling, and reasonable grammar. In a just world, I’d never be allowed to talk to the Internet again. Not that anybody’s reading.

But that’s just it; the lack of an audience takes the pressure off, and allows my biological need to write to find some outlet. And yet, the possibility that someone might some day come across my writing on the sixtieth page of a Google search, and possibly even be amused by it is just enough incentive for me to keep at it. I could write to my heart’s content in some offline journal, but I wouldn’t try so hard to be funny, or interesting – or even-handed, or worried that I haven’t paid attention to both sides of an issue.

None of this counts, of course. I mean, it explains why blogging is good for me, but not why my blogging is good for you. So, uh, sorry about that.

One last thing, probably nothing to do with the New York Times, thing. I have often seen it suggested that blogging is a pernicious waste of time. While I am flattered by the fact that a few people apparently believe that I have some kind of medical science laboratory or engineering workshop, with half-finished, world-changing discoveries sitting around, all suffering from blog-induced neglect – I really don’t. If I wasn’t blogging, I’d be repurposing that time to creating ever-more elaborate sandwiches, or putting in time on the miniature golf course. So you can stop worrying, now.