Interview With Yours Truly for a Blogging Website

I received an email around a month ago from some website called Blog Interviewer.  It's a pretty cool idea, actually; it pretty much consists of interviews with bloggers from all around the world, with links to their blog.  It asks some basic questions, like "why did you start the blog", "do you make any income off it", etc.  Anyway, an anonymous fan recommended my blog to the website, and then I got the email, so I thank whoever it was for that. 




My blog typically deals with issues surrounding our foundering economy; in my opinion, the state of our economy, and its continuous decline, is a result of misallocations of capital, especially energy. As I feel that our society will continue to unravel as a result of a lack of energy inputs (to simplify this, universal terms for this include “peak oil” and “energy descent”), and I will be hopefully be around to blog about it.



I am hoping to get a job in a law firm, as I have a B.A. and also a certification in paralegal studies, but I feel that my chances of realizing this are slight, again, due to the state of the U.S. economy. Jobs in non-essential, non-productive industries like law will be hard to come by in the future, IMO.
But, for now, I am working overnights in a box store. Blogging is a hobby, one that I wish I had more time to take part in. It’s one of a series of hobbies competing for my time (among others, I work out, I’m a big movie buff, I read, etc.)


It started with a book that I read in the summer of 2008, when Americans were paying over 4 dollars for a gallon of gas. It is called “The Long Emergency” by James Howard Kunstler, published in 2005, and it foresaw a future of numerous hardships and disasters caused by several factors, including the sheninigans of the banking and finance industries, a peak in energy production, climate change, among others. It has been remarkably accurate, and it really opened my eyes as to the true nature of what we were facing. Upon much further research, I am more compelled than ever by what is going on, and that is a major part of my blog.



I started the blog in late 2006, originally to promote something else that I was working on at the time. I then realized the potential to use it as a personal sounding board, since even then, there was a lot going on that I wanted to speak or vent about.


I have only been able to get results from the past week, but according to that, I get an average of 25 visits a day. It’s a very modest blog, but if one person gets something out of it, it’s well worth my time and effort. I have had problems with spammers (I get comments, most of which promote other blogs or are in Chinese), but I also heard from someone in Indonesia who really likes the blog.


To be honest, I did not start the blog to make money. I never had an expectation of making any money off the blog, but if it were possible, I would love to. Unfortunately, I think there are so many out there (I heard a billion according to some source), that you would have to have some real skills, and bring something special to the table, in order to have any chance of using a blog for a money-making venture. Also, there are many other blogs and websites out there that are covering the same terrain as I am. However, I feel I offer a slight difference, in that I am giving more of a “man on the street” perspective. I am not a scientist, an engineer, or an economist. I am just a regular guy. Well, not quite. I don’t own a car, and I live in a heavily sprawled area where a car is pretty much mandatory. Hence the title of my blog. I have to walk a lot of times through an ugly landscape, and it pisses me off.


Someone who is interested in hearing some of what’s really going on, even if it isn’t all roses. If you’re looking for lighthearted posts, or celebrity gossip, this blog probably isn’t for you. But if you are cynical and worried about things, and wish to make sense of what’s going on, I think you could do worse than visiting my blog and browsing through some of my posts.


It’s hard to say. Sometimes I spend up to a half hour or an hour, and sometimes, I go days without blogging. Again, I have a lot of activities competing for my time, as well as work. I do very much regret that I don’t have a lot of time to blog. It’s not so much just the act of blogging, it’s the challenge and the excitement of finding something that I can blog about. This can be time-consuming, as I like adding my own personal input into things, rather than just copying and pasting someone else’s work.


You should give me a try because I try to make my posts as substantive and well thought out as possible. I also try to be fun; what I write about is usually depressing enough, so it doesn’t pay to take myself too seriously. You also might learn something that you did not know. There are so many layers to what’s going on that even I learn new things every time I venture out to see what’s going on.


Perhaps the only advice I can offer is to stick with it. Again, what has been a challenge for me is that I was hoping to form a modest blog with some loyal visitors and a few comments, and I don’t even get that at times. There are so many blogs out there that it is very difficult to carve out a niche and gather your own loyal readership. But I find that I love blogging because it serves as a kind of personal diary. There are times when I’ll just cycle through my old posts, and I’ll be like, “I wrote that?” So it can be very fulfilling on a personal level.