The Way We Blog Now

There comes a time when every blogger wonders why the hell he blogs. I wonder every time I sit down to write another HoseMaster of Wine post. Just what's in it for me? Oh, sure, there is the endless adulation and parade of groupies, the book offers, the TV movie proposal and the chance to run for Sarah Palin's vacant seat--I just hope she left it down. But it's thankless work. Folks drop by, spend three minutes, and then move on. It's like being the sex slave for a Bob Jones University fraternity. And the vast majority of visitors don't comment, which is a little hard to get used to. It's a lot like being a traffic wreck--folks just drive by slowly and rubberneck. Keep moving, folks, the only thing dead here are the jokes. So why do I continue blogging? I've done a great deal of soul-searching on the subject and have come up with these answers.

I'm a lonely loser

I know this is hard to imagine given my enormous personal magnetism--hell, I can't walk by a refrigerator without sticking to it. But the truth is writing is a lonely pursuit, and those of us who pursue it as a form of self-expression, instead of, say, embroidering alcohol warning labels in our forearms with a dull razor blade, or trying to knock over empty wine bottles with corks fired from our butts, understand that it's best not to have interpersonal relationships. Readers of blogs understand this--the bloggers who post the most frequently are the loneliest people on the planet. These are sad people who, if they weren't emptying their thoughts onto the electronic page, would be out in public talking to themselves and approaching strangers with their index fingers wiggling through the zippers of their Gap jeans. Come on, look at these losers who post every day, who suffer from OAB (Over Active Blogging) and can't suppress the urge to fulminate. What can their real lives be like? You don't want to know. You are grateful that they are losers, that they have the time to sit and posit ill-conceived opinions for your dissection, that they spend hours carefully talking about things they have no actual, confirmable knowledge of, that their idea of a good time is staring at a cursor like it's suddenly going to turn into a Pong machine. But I can tell you, we are lonely losers. And if it weren't for the Internet we'd be stalking Leslie Sbrocco and The Real Housewives of Yountville.


Wine is endlessly fascinating

I spend hours and hours of any given day thinking about wine, about the wine business, about all there is to know about wine. And I figure everyone is interested in what I think about wine. My thoughts, after all, are damned profound and worth reading, like every wine blogger's. I write to inspire people, I write to make them think, I write because the world would be a much emptier place without me. I feel it is my duty to share my thoughts about wine. OK, have you ever thought of this? Just how many wines are produced in the world in a single vintage? Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions. Many of them never even get scores! Imagine that, thousands and thousands of score-free wines! So do they really exist? Or do they break into existence only when they achieve a score? Like, if you were a baseball player who had only 10 ABs in the Major Leagues and went hitless so that your batting average was .000, are you even considered a player? Do you even exist as a ballplayer? Scary, huh? And I'll bet you never thought about it that way either. See, that's what I mean. I have all these brilliant wine thoughts that need to be shared. Here's another one. Does Game Theory apply to wine? Say you set out to find a rare bottle of wine, maybe a bottle of Sine Qua Non or a single-vineyard Pinot Noir from Siduri, just what chance do you have of finding it? Game Theory suggests that if the wine is also seeking you, your odds are great you'll find it quickly no matter how rare it is. But Game Theory also says that if you seek both the Sine Qua Non and the Siduri you're more likely to find them in alphabetical order and be very sorry. Counterintuitive, I know, but there's math to prove it. So I blog to enlighten. Don't we all?


I have serious emotional problems

I crave attention. What did people do before the Internet, before you could regurgitate your profoundly tedious personal torment all over your unknowing public? Sure, there's always NPR, but the goddam pledge drive always gets in the way. You can call people one at a time and dump your neuroses on them, but, hey, you're a blogger, see above, you don't have any interpersonal relationships that amount to more than you see each other at Starbucks every morning while you do the Ken-Ken in the NY Times and wonder what became of Barbie-Barbie. The Internet is perfect. You can ostensibly blog about wine but every now and then you slip in stuff about how your girlfriend just dumped you for some sort of egg that vibrates (must be one nervous chicken that laid that), or that your beloved pet anaconda choked to death on a vibrating egg your ex left lying around, or how you wish someone would send you free samples of wine to validate your status as a critic. I crave attention and I have delusions of grandeur. I think I have talent and that it would be a crime not to use it. Like all fakes and forgers. I know that I know more about wine than anyone I know, both of them (once again, see above). I believe that with time my influence in the wine world will surpass that of Parker, Shanken, Tanzer and Bipin (my favorite Marcel Marceau character) combined. What's going to stop me but my lack of insight, talent and knowledge? I crave attention, have delusions of grandeur, and I'm trapped inside a woman's body. Next to some fucking egg. I have emotional problems, therefore I blog. I'm searching for my voice, and as it turns out, I'm just God's ventriloquist dummy.
God (left, yes He is Senor Wences) and the HoseMaster


This is the way we blog now.