The Buhner.com Blog

Hell, what’s there to say? The post below this one says February 2nd. That’s over five months.

There’s no excuse for that.

I can sit here all day and make excuses, and I’ve done that in the past, too (feel free to scroll down). It comes down to something relatively simple. In the past, I wasn’t working. In order to occupy myself, get my writing out somewhere, and vent a little bit, I got the content for Buhner.com rolling. I got a few people on board to write articles, and they did… every once in a while.

What eventually happened (in the middle of writing up the 10 Job Challenge articles) is I actually got a job. It was a great thing to happen to my family, obviously, but it’s a crappy thing to happen to Buhner.com. I thought that I would still be writing content, but after working all day, I find myself keeping sane by taking the activities that normally took a chunk of my day and tried to cram it into a fraction of that day. Things that got lost in the wayside were things like Buhner.com. It’s not something I’m very proud of, but it’s the way laziness (and that’s the best thing to label it, no ADD crap here) works.

So what makes me think things are going to change? Nothing, really. If anything, between the fire department and a two month old son, my free time is minimal. Things that I used to regularly update (such as my Scoresheet site) aren’t getting updated. That, and OOTP 6 is eating up most of my “rec” time, which sucks because it totally draws me in and I can play that damned game for hours on hours. If I open the program, it’s pretty much what I’m doing until I shut the damned thing down. This isn’t a knock on the producers of the game, it’s just something I need to not touch if I plan on getting other things accomplished.

I did lose one job though. If you read enough into the site, you know that I picked up a side job with the East Hampton Star doing the “shorts” for my hometown of Bridgehampton. It was a minor bit of income, but income nonetheless, and it got my name out there. I didn’t see a gnegative to it.

What it actually did was made me dread writing. Nothing sucked my creativity dry like doing that weekly column. If you actually read the thing locally, you wouldn’t know I wrote it outside of the fact that my name was slathered on top of it.

I started off with energy, writing this whole entertaining thing with the information I was given. Basically, the purpose of the column was to tell people what was going on in Bridgehampton that week. If you were going to visit Bridgehampton (or lived there and was looking for something to do), technically you could visit my column to get ideas of what was happening in the community. I took my example from the Southampton Press and Steven Kotz, whom I’ve had the pleasure to meet on several occasions covering the same event. Kotz would throw a little personality into the column, mentioning things that were going on in his life and relating it to the events that he was covering. It was an entertaining read, especially considering the content he had to write about (church barbeques can only be so interesting).

That wasn’t to be done at the Star. The “first person narrative” was a definate no-no. The second column I wrote for them had two paragraphs of content completely taken out because it talked about my adventures relating to the Bridgehampton events. To quote Joe Friday, the Star column was “just the facts.”

There’s nothing that takes the energy out of you than restricting any kind of creative freedom you might have doing something you used to love. It was basically data entry, except I had to find the data. Worse yet, I could give info about six events to the Star, and only three of them would make the paper, because the other three were talked about elsewhere in the paper. We must not be redundant, apparently. So, not only does my column have no flavor whatsoever, but it’s usually clipped in half and looks like we couldn’t find anything to write about.

I could rant on and on about the Star, but this segment is getting pretty long. I will wrap up quickly by throwing together a few links; a few for HamptonsView.com, which I write for now (with a bit of creative freedom). I wrote an article about riding the bus, and another about growing up in the Hamptons. Part of getting off my butt and writing more is to keep producing content for HamptonsView, and if I keep writing for them, I’ll keep writing for here, and so on. HamptonsView.com content pretty much has to be about the Hamptons (or at least be Hamptons-related), so if I come up with ideas that have nothing to do with the Hamptons, instead of scrapping them, they’re going here. I also reserve the right to reproduce articles that may not have made HamptonsView or perhaps got edited more than I wanted them to be. That hasn’t happened yet, but you never know with editors. HamptonsView treats me well, though.

THe other link I wanted to throw out there was ColeTyler.com. That’s where the boy is, who just turned two months old Sunday. If he keeps me from writing, it’s worth it, because at the same time, he’s my inspiration to do better things. I think of things that I want to do (make a living just writing, publish a book, maybe even a screenplay), and these are things that I couldn’t necessarily get off my butt and do for myself. Seeing my wife and son makes me want to do them, for them.

Oh, and another thing. I’ve set up a mailing list so that if you’re interested in when I update this thing, you can just send a blank email to buhnerdotcomupdate-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. That should put you on the mailing list, which I’ll send an email to every time I update the site. Obviously, I’m not collecting the emails and selling them to porn companies. You know, unless you want me to. Which I’ll assume by the look you’re giving me that you don’t, so I won’t. I promise.

Anyway, that’s it for now (and it was a bit much, wasn’t it?) Hopefully more tomorrow.