Blog off, blogface

I feel remarkably cheerful today. The sun is shining, the working week is in its death throes, and a nice man from the tourist bus tour company around the corner approached me in the street to tell me I’m beautiful, which is the kind of compliment I receive around once a century. The only thing cheesing me off is my inability to think of a better word for this shindig.

I hate the word ‘blog’ with unreserved passion. A friend of mine once described it as ’shudderingly naff’, and I have to agree. But what other option is there? It’s not a journal; journals exist to record the minutiae of everyday life, and this is rather somewhere to post the product of my frothing bile now and again. It’s not a diary for precisely the same reason. If I were recording my published work I could refer to it as an archive. Sadly, my only published piece of writing appeared about six years ago in monthly music rag Rock Sound, and it was treated with such contempt by the editorial team that they saw fit to riddle it with typos that weren’t there when I submitted it. Rubbish. So no, it’s not an archive.

This leaves me with only one choice: blog. Blog. Even thinking the word makes me cringe a little inside, and speaking it out loud makes me want to jump under a bus in order to rid the world of my stinking blog-saying self.

In my mind, there is no way blogging will be a truly respected art-form until a better word is found for it. Writing is a wonderful art; I write for a living, albeit throwaway pieces of hundred-word nonsense; I write fiction that no-one will ever read; in my head, I write epic essays on music that are published in respected monthlies. I love writing. But when it comes to the word ‘blog’, I find myself devoid of synonyms that will make me feel good about the whole process.

I need another noun for this space. I need that noun to be a verb, too, so I can feel warm inside while in the process of using this page. Until then, I fear that the act of blogging will make me feel like some sort of SugarApe employee. “Yeah, I’m like, blogging. Here’s a link to my blog and shit. I’m blogging in the blogsophere, yeah? It’s totally Mexico.”

An easy-peel M&S satsuma to anyone who can think of a better word.