Yes, much as we’ve all enjoyed the sporadic essays masquerading as “blogs”, it’s time to bring this renegade online diary more fully into the ancient traditions of the Blog. In my limited tastes of the daily torrential feast of blogdom (would you like ice with that mixed metaphor, ma’am?), I’ve learned a few blog commandments that I’ve managed to break so far.

THE BLOG COMMANDMENTS (A Selection)

• Thou shalt make thy blog regular as a scandal in Iraq: it shall appear weekly, if not daily. Else the curse of forgetfulness shall doom thy readers, and ye shall fall by the way like those who have no place on a server.
• Thou shalt remember that the average attention span of an Internet viewer is approximately 3.7 milliseconds, and, in humility before the billions of other pages competing with thine own, make thy blog short.
• Though it stir up wrath and confusion in the newbie, yet shalt thou cram as many short blogs as possible onto one page, putting the oldest at the bottom, and stacking each fresh blog atop the next like a backwards tower of Babel. Thus may those who measure time in milliseconds avoid the yoke of scrolling down the page to read your latest blog.
• Thou shalt not be like the hypocrites who edit and revise and burnish their blogs until they shine like a manuscript fit for the New Yorker, and then parade their blog as if it were written in haste and without revision. Such is the way of those too lazy to use their time on work for real publication, and too proud to admit how few people will ever read their blog if they cease to publish elsewhere. When their few friends read and shake their heads in admiration, those hypocrites have had their reward.

Keeping these injunctions soberly before my eyes, I’m moving this blog to the home page and resolving to put something up here every day or so, if not every day, Monday - Friday. So tell your friends!

Leaving the Blog Commandments aside, I’ve another reason for the new format. Though the path to this farm and cabin was frought with philosophical motives fit for many a dreary essay, now that I’m here, the life itself is quite different. Like any real life, it’s full of incidents that are best brief and fresh and without prelude and epilogue.

So if you’re curious about the day-to-day adventures of an ex-suburbanite, come back soon.