A year ago today, I posted my first commentary to “American Currents.” It was a piece about a proposal to change Halloween to a floating holiday. Instead of always being on the 31st, “All Hallows’ Eve” would be pinned to the final Saturday of October every year, for the convenience of retailers. It’s been a long and interesting 365 days ever since; I’m taking the anniversary as an opportunity to look back.
On October 9, 2009 I responded to a Craigslist ad titled “Seeking Bloggers.” The poster, Jeff Weiss, replied immediately and explained that he envisioned a blog staffed by a team of about five writers from different parts of the country, who would post daily commentaries on topics of social, political, economic, and cultural import in the U.S. on a rotating basis. He suggested that each of us commit to doing three essays a week.
I suspected that most of the eventual participants would be young and liberal, and I strongly urged Jeff to find at least one conservative commentator to foster a lively exchange and a potentially broader array of readers. I also came up with the name “American Currents” and volunteered to proof and edit the other writers’ copy, so Jeff honored me with the title of “supervising editor.”
Privately, I doubted the thing would last long -- most probably it would end up being little more than a vanity project for the writers and its founder -- but the opportunity for “ten-finger calisthenics” appealed to me. Apart from the discipline of having to research and write brief reactions to breaking news topics assigned to me, I constantly had ideas flitting through my brain with no suitable place to put them.
For nearly six months, we made a decent go of it. The other folks stuck to their two or three pieces a week, but I tried to write more often, and often did -- sometimes having to hammer something out between midnight and one in the morning. Among many other things, we wrote about:
and many other topics. We even wrote several times about Obama and the Super Bowl.
[I have provided links only to my particular commentaries; the site is not easy to get around, so if you want to see what other people wrote, or the questions as Jeff put them to us, you’ll have to go to the Home page and click on “Prev” at the bottom of each page to work your way back to the relevant dates.]
Several personalities offered (or forced) opportunities for multiple visitations: Sarah Palin’s Newsweek cover, the so-called “Visor-gate,” her demurral that she’s not a candidate for President in 2012, her mini spat with “Family Guy,” the source of her mysteriously enduring popularity, and whether Palin and her conservative cohorts are seditious; and Tiger Woods’s Thanksgiving weekend embarrassment, and his decision to take a time-out from golf. By the time his televised apology rolled around, I was so uninspired to write about Woods that I treated it as a Winter Olympics sport, which made it more fun.
Cultural events such as the movies “2012” and “Avatar” offered the chance to talk about larger issues. Often, Jeff asked us to address events and personalities I wouldn’t have heard of otherwise, such as Meredith Baxter’s coming out, the New York City EMT controversy, the teacher’s aide fired after nude photos were circulated from her lost cell phone, John Mayer’s Playboy interview, Rielle Hunter’s GQ “revelations” about her affair with John Edwards, and the Minnesota man indicted for encouraging suicides over the Internet. Occasionally I grabbed the chance to write about topics of my own choosing, including atheism in America.
At the end of April, Jeff said he was giving up the blog. It was too much work coming up with a topic of the day, every day, with a graphic and getting us to respond. The hit numbers weren’t climbing as high as he’d hoped. After a week or two, I decided I’d continue to write for “American Currents,” and invited the other commentators to contribute on a looser, more personal basis.
Again, as I suspected, output from the others dropped considerably, and “American Currents” has all but become my personal blog. I’ve written series about recycling redeemable cans and bottles in my apartment building, and my experiences as an actor in 48-Hour Film Festival contests (both series technically unfinished), as well as bigger local and national news stories like the disappearance of Kyron Horman, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the WikiLeaks release of Afghanistan war documents, the national bed bug infestation, and the Veterans for Peace “obscene” protest of the wars on October 3 (a three-parter). There have also been very personal accounts of my thoughts while walking, an attack on canned music, and the description of an incident in which I called out the police on a girl I saw on the street.
Now that a year has passed, I’m surprised to find I pounded out more than 64,000 words in nearly 150 short essays. They’ve gotten fewer but longer and more personal as we moved beyond the original format designed by Jeff: when you choose want you want to talk about, there’s less chance of having almost nothing to say, as happened, for instance, with Super Bowl ads and Toyota’s massive car recall, which merited just 59 and 57 words, respectively, from me.
I look forward to another interesting and thought-provoking year.
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