Better Off Alone

Earlier this week, Micah and I were extended an invitation for an interview with Illinois Times. We gladly accepted the opportunity to promote Movie Geeks Club and the Just Two Guys blog. We were scheduled to interview sometime on Monday.

Then I grabbed a copy of this week's Illinois Times while I was picking up a few things at Food Fantasies. As I was flipping through it during my lunch break, I noticed in the Cap City section of the paper, that a staff writer at IT has written a "humorous" plug for the Springfield blogging scene titled "You Are Not Alone."

Basically, the column makes blanket statements about Springfield's bloggers, claiming that we are all "middle-aged men who spend their nights in their underpants, typing about their unrequited dreams and day-to-day anxiety and trading funny clips from YouTube with each other." When we're not torturing readers with our "tales of woe," it seems, we're boring our readers with unimportant tidbits from our lives.

I am not a person who is easily offended, but the condescending tone of this column really made me angry. Micah and I are proud members of the local blogging scene. With Movie Geeks Club, we've tried to create something of cultural interest to people in the community. We've tried to give people a place to go to see movies they might not otherwise see. With our Just Two Guys blog and public access show, we try to promote local arts and events. We try to showcase local talent. We try to entertain and inform people. We do all of this in our free time for nothing other than the enjoyment it gives us.

Russ at Springfield Rewind spends a lot of his time at the Sangamon Valley Collection, collecting photographs of interesting Springfield landmarks, and then photographing those landmarks today. This is culturally significant and important. Dan Naumovich of Blog Free Springfield is one of the best local writers I've had the pleasure of knowing. I always enjoy his column in the State-Journal Register, and I always look forward to his blog posts. His writing is intelligent, witty, and utterly enjoyable.

Will Reynolds addresses issues of local, national, and global importance on his blog, Where There's a Will There's a Way. We have Vatren Jurin's blog, Ask Me Anything About Agriculture. He uses his blog to share what he knows as an experienced agronimist. Marie Carnes, one of Springfield's smartest and most well-spoken bloggers, always has something interesting to say. When she blogs, we read.

We have the anonymous Thirtywhat, who posts her reflections on everything from growing older to playing World of Warcraft with her daughter. She has written extensively about her struggles with Polycystic Kidney Disease, and I feel that I have learned much about this complicated disease from reading her experiences.

The Eleventh Hour Blog was one of my favorite places to go for daily tidbits of local and national news, spun with a local flavor. ." We have bloggers who post creative original content regularly, like Dave Heinzel. We have poets and writers. We have people interested in raising awareness about Mass Transit problems in Springfield. We have an entire sub-community of UIS student bloggers. We have a blog written by Larry Stevens, a Vachel Lindsay scholar. In truth, there are too many local blogs for me to highlight them all or to expound their virtues. The bottom line is, we have a wonderful community of bloggers who spend a lot of time sharing their knowledge, their background, their expertise, and, heaven forbid, the stories of their day-to-day lives.

And I would wager that not one of the bloggers mentioned above has ever written a blog post in his or her underpants. I am offended by the Illinois Times making the analogy that reading local blogs is like "motorists who can’t resist looking at a bloody wreck or TV viewers who wait anxiously for the paternity-test results on The Maury Show." I'm sorry, IT staff writer, that it is so difficult for you to sit there and read our blogs in your underwear. I'm sorry we couldn't be more interesting. I'm sorry that we're the Internet equivalent of trashy daytime talk shows. I'm sorry you don't enjoy our community. Maybe you and the rest of your friends at Illinois Times would be better off alone.

Needless to say, Micah and I have declined an interview with Illinois Times. We don't need the publicity that badly.