My first blog post, ever.

So this is a blog.  It makes me feel funny.  Like I already feel obligated to post a bazillion hilarious/thought provoking/insightful things and have a bazooka-jillion readers, even though I know that I am nowhere near talented or interesting enough to have even half of that.  Which, since I’m notoriously bad at math, I’m assuming is around 10.

I’m sure this will end up just like every other thing I spontaneously decide to do, and I’ll post faithfully for a few weeks or even a few months, but then slowly I’ll begin to forget or get bored and the majority of my blog posts will become explanations about why I don’t write more blog posts that only I read anyway.  Oh well, sounds like it might be entertaining while it lasts, and since you can never have too much entertainment, I guess I’ll just go ahead with this doomed venture.

So, you are probably wondering about the title of this doomed blog, and if you weren’t, I’m sorry for assuming that you were.  Anyway, since I’m not really satisfied with it at the moment, I may change it. But for the moment it is titled “Lamplighter Alley”.  The story behind me wanting to be a lamplighter isn’t very interesting or action-filled, but I’ll share it with you anyway.

When I was in middle school, my friends and I were easily bored, but found amusement in posing theoretical questions of varying difficulty to each other.  One day one of these easily-bored friends asked this of us:

“If you could grow up and have any unusual job you wanted, what would you be?”

Many of my fellow bored-friends thought long and hard before coming up with awesome answers like “emu farmer”, and “moon-rock harvester”, and even “cat shaver”, (which to my now somewhat more immature mind sounds really funny and is obviously an innuendo for something, but at the time it just seemed like a funny but awesome job).  When inevitably the group’s attention turned to me, I was a little nervous to admit that I, in fact, hadn’t needed to ponder the question at all, because all my life I’d wanted to be a lamplighter.  Now, to be clear, I’m not entirely sure that “lamplighter” is the proper term for the job that I envisioned, and I am relatively sure that it’s not even supposed to be one word, but whatevs. “Lamp lighter” just doesn’t look as cool and can’t be used as a screen name.

Anyway, when my friends stared blankly at me, because obviously a lamplighter wasn’t a real thing, unlike moon-rock harvesters and emu farmers, I had to explain, which went something like this:

“You know those movies that take place in, like, old England, or something, before they had electricity?  You know how sometimes between scenes they show that weird old dude walking around with a candle on a stick, lighting the candles in the lamps along the street so that people who are out walking at night can be comforted by the soft glow of candlelight showing them the way and protecting them from rapists?  Yeah, I want to be that guy.”

This half-hearted explanation of my future career plans was always followed by a somewhat long pause, then someone offers an obligatory “That’s cool…” while someone else points out that we have electricity now, so what need would the world have for a lamplighter?

And that’s how, slowly but surely, I gave up my dream of growing up to be a lamplighter. But I still want to be one.  As for the Alley part, I guess I always thought alleys were dangerous and mysterious spaces where I was sure all the cool kids went to hang out or get killed, and I especially like streets that are named "Alley". Like Diagon Alley. Fuck yeah, Harry Potter.

EDIT: I decided to take out the part where I basically tell you that this whole blog is shit, and add something about "Lamplighter Alley" that I thought of at 2:47 am while at work last night. I was wondering why exactly I put two unrelated words that I like together to create a blog called "Lamplighter Alley", when I began picturing a place called "Lamplighter Alley". It would be a street out of the way and shunned by society because in the movies the lamplighters always seem really creepy even though they are trying to be helpful, kind of like friendly lepers. There would be lots of lamps on Lamplighter Alley, but none of them would ever be lit because the lamplighters would be all like "Fuck that we light lamps all night, we're not going to do it on our street too. Besides, there are no rapists here, only creepy but helpful lamplighters." All the houses would be dark and decrepit-looking, and there would be no flowers or sprinklers or white picket fences, and it would always be cloudy and dark because in my head this street is somewhere in a seedy part of London and I heard somewhere that London is always cloudy.

Welcome to Lamplighter Alley, bitches. I hope you brought a flashlight because we're too cool for electricity.