Why I am here. Reasons to Write.

Recently I have been analysing my love life and in doing so stumbled on a blog by an anonymous player who goes by the pseudonym, Chase Amante (bear with me here; don't roll your eyes). Of course his number one objective is to "bed women quickly," but if go past the superficiality, he comes up with some pretty deep sociological observations. For instance the women of Write on the Water might have a strong reaction to his article titled Should You Pay for a Date? He is a smart guy in a shallow field of work, and I admire his writing skills.

Reading the articles makes me reflect anew on why I started blogging and what my goals are. I was inspired by niche online authors just like Chase who entertained or stimulated my thoughts. I promised myself that someday I would share everything I learned in the hopes that my articles would stimulate someone navigating through a similarly wayward sea of life. I started writing my amateur yachting blog over at Waves three years ago while embarking on a career as a professional yacht broker. An interest in camaraderie led me to Write on the Water.

Below are two of my blogging heros that influenced me to start in the first place.

Assaf Oron

I took a statistics course in college whose teacher, Assaf Oron, wrote a political blog at Daily Kos and still does. He was an obviously interesting guy, an Israeli living in America with a good sense of humour, and an excellent teacher though he did not know it. I found his blog linked to his faculty webpage. I still do not know whether I agree or not with his views, but I thought it was cool to see into another world in his life, a world he did not mention at all during class. I do not know either if anyone else knew he had a blog, and, despite never talking to him about it, I felt like we shared a secret. I would check and read his new posts eagerly and learned as much about Israeli politics as statistics. For instance did you know that if you write Israel-Palestine and Israel/Palestine mean different things? Some of his posts were incredibly popular on Daily Kos with hundreds of comments, so many that I could not read them all. It made me think it would be cool to write a blog someday and meet people in person who had read my posts – or even just to have them slyly read my posts and wink at me from the back of a crowded classroom.

Ricky Williams

I learned about the Wayback Internet Machine, a little known but incredible resource for retrieving old online content. I used it to pull back the journals of Ricky Williams, the kooky football star whose novel commentary has always spoken to me. His blog contained a fascinating dialogue of personal opinions and day to day vignettes. I like when he finished off one post by hoping his coach was not reading Run Ricky Run, the name of his blog. It is an amazing thing to see into the unfiltered mind of someone so successful and unique. I think that accessibility is a wonderful feature of the online world. You can follow Ricky on Twitter these days.

Question

Assaf and Ricky among many others inspired me to blog at some point in my life. I hope my backlinks ping their sites, and they are rewarded by knowing that someone is foolish enough to repeat their mistaken blogging efforts. Have any bloggers inspired you to write? Who? And feel free to share your opinion on Chase's writing if you follow through to his site.

Please feel free to visit my Wednesday post on Waves which should be a review of the FLIBS if WordPress has not fouled me up and delayed my post scheduled for midnight.

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