How to procrastinate
I want to write. I feel like I can write well enough, and that I have some fairly novel ideas. I've written before. A blog post here, an online magazine article there. Nothing too significant, but certainly fun. When I decided I wanted to write seriously I was quite excited. It came at a period in my life where I had more free time than ever before (a combination of quitting my job and the COVID-19 pandemic), and I relished the idea of using writing as my form of creative expression.
First things first: I needed to touch up my blog, which I felt looked pretty sparse and dated. This was the beginning of some world-class procrastination.
I started by redesigning the blog in my image, and after my likeness. This was quite satisfying, and I kept finding myself coming back to an ultra-minimalist look and feel. I'm a big advocate of lightweight and nippy websites, as well as the old-school internet before Javascript dominated everything. After a few iterations, I found myself with a blog built entirely in vanilla HTML with little in the way of styling.
I hadn't reached optimal procrastination just yet (I realise in hindsight) and started building out an entire blogging platform. A few days later I launched Bear Blog - the most minimal blogging platform ever. It's supposed to be a play on the idea of bear (bare) minimal blogging.
It received some great (and pretty overwhelming) attention on Hacker News and Reddit, and before I knew it I was answering support requests, pushing improvements, and all kinds of over "important" things to keep myself busy. To keep myself from writing.
After a week or two, my work on Bear Blog slowed down a bit and I was once again confronted with writing. Shit.
Subconsciously looking for an out, looking for another distraction to feed my procrastination monster, I decided that I would love to write on a typewriter (I have a soft spot for analogue tech and have always wanted to own one of these intricate machines). It took me a while, but I managed to track down a beautiful TIPPA-S from the 1970s for a reasonable price from an eccentric conspiracy theorist (who called the guards at the mall where we met up Nazis, but that is a story for another time). It took me another day to ink the machine (due to COVID-19 I couldn't get my hands on any ink ribbons and ended up hand-painting the old ribbon with India ink).
Now I'm here. No more excuses. It took a while to get to this point, but now I have no choice.
I have to write.
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