I don’t know what I’m doing more than half of the time.

Midway through 2021, I am starting a blog. This is ironic for a few reasons, one being that earlier in 2021, I ended a blog.

I’d kept Back of the Cereal Box since 2003, and while I’m proud of some of the writing I did there and while I’m glad for many of the connections I made through keeping that blog, I also realized I was no longer the person who wrote it during its heyday. I imagine I’ll write about the changes that separated the old me from the current me, but I think more than anything I just needed a clean break — the opportunity to write without necessarily being shackled to nearly twenty years of other stuff I wrote. This is that clean break.

One of the reasons Back of the Cereal Box was not as successful as it could have been is that I started it when I was in college, and my brain had not yet fully formed and was therefore full of bad ideas. Another reason (and one of those things I would have sorted out had I launched the blog later in life) is that it lacked a focus; there was something freeing about the idea of writing about anything and everything, but the truth is that most readers didn’t not equally care about personal stories, video game lore and etymological trivia. Some did. They’re neat people.

Now that I’m making an honest effort at writing again, I’m putting that writing in places where a reader would be more likely to enjoy all of it. For example, earlier this year, I launched The Singing Wolf, a stripped-down blog that is exclusively about etymology. I won’t write about anything else there. If you like etymology but don’t care about Princess Zelda, this blog is probably for you. And there are some video game topics I would like to write about in the future. They will probably be posted on a third site, that is specifically about video games. It made the most sense to have the blog at DrewMackie.com be one focused on me, so expect writing about my life experiences, my sexuality and my interactions with pop culture. “But Drew,” you may be saying, “you cannot write about yourself if you’re writing about pop culture!” To which I say, “If you’ve spent ten minutes around me, you know that I experience a lot of popular culture on a personal level.” To know me is to know the pop culture I think about, for good and for bad. In fact, it is a pop culture topic that motivated me to sit down and write an essay for the first time in years and post it here on this new blog. (Please be kind. I am rusty.)

I hope to get personal here in a way I often didn’t feel fully comfortable on my previous blog, because that’s not really what that blog was but also because even just a few years ago, I was still scared to be completely honest with myself about a lot of things. I’m older now. I’m a little clearer on who I am. I’m less scared of someone rejecting me for who I am than I am of someone liking me for being someone I’m not, if that makes sense. This should be interesting.

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