Dart Adams presents The Unbearable Lightness Of Blogging: The Pursuit Of Happiness

The thing about blogging (or writing for that matter) is that when you are genuinely unhappy or less than enthused about your current situation it's extremely easy to tell. It will come out in your writing. I've posted for several different sites in the past (I Hook A Beat Up, Nerd With Swag, eMusic, etc.) but I used to post for a football related site called Armchair Linebacker that was a spinoff of the once popular blog Dumpin.net that I used to visit quite often back in the days. Raven Mack & Mike Dikk decided to do a football blog and asked me to contribute. I said hell yeah.

The season I was asked to contribute also happened to be the season that the Patriots were going 16-0. The NFL posts on Dumpin were essentially everyone hating the Patriots and me talking shit about how they were unbeatable. Keep that in mind. The site began during the '08 NFL Playoffs. I started writing full playoff round recaps (partly because I thought I'd be documenting yet another glorious championship season like I'd done previously with the '07 Red Sox & '08 Boston Celtics on Poisonous Paragraphs). As we all know, that didn't happen.


It's a little hard to have sympathy for a guy who went to two championship parades in 12 months that was denied the opportunity of going to his second championship parade in another 7 months, after all. I was pissed but the Patriots would just win it all the next year, right? Wrong. Forget that I was right that they'd go 11-5. Forget they missed the playoffs when they were supposed to win the Super Bowl. Forget that the best QB in the NFL was gone for the season in the opening game. I was hated because I criticized the hell out of my winning team in a season the Lions went 0-16 & the other writers favorite teams sucked donkey balls.

I was seen as a whiny asshole and a fairweather fan when in Boston we call that "honesty". If you look back at what I wrote that season, not only was I often spot on & correct but I made full explanations and tried to make my fellow bloggers on the site understand where I was coming from. They weren't having it and they first tried to replace me but that dude flaked so they actually removed me from the blog before my final post of the year went up. Dayum!

I was seething about being let go mostly because I was going to quit on my own terms because Armchair Linebacker ceased being any fun for me. I wrote about the Patriots because I legitimately love NFL football and my team. I have since 1978. I was a fan back when they were godawful and I'll die a Patriots fan. I'm from Boston. There is no fairweather in me (it's simply not allowed). Reading the other "woe is me, I'm in hell" posts about horrible teams & inept franchises was draining and not conducive to good writing. I should've been happy I was free of it but I was fuming.

Raven Mack, the founder of the site hit me up on Facebook (which no one does cuz I fuckin' hate Facebook like Lil' Wayne hates sobriety & condoms) and asked me to come back to Armchair Linebacker for this season. My stupid ass said yes. It was apparent that I was less than enthused with writing there and I faxed in each successive post. When the Patriots lost back to back games I dreaded writing anything over at Armchair Linebacker about it. I just ended up saying "fuck it" and quitting. My writing sucked while I was there and the situation obviously wasn't the best one to continue contributing to. I should've just cut my losses.


Writing on Poisonous Paragraphs & Bloggerhouse made me realize that life is too short to not do things you genuinely love or whatever you enjoy. With my writing, if I don't care or if I'm unhappy I'll just go through the motions and my writing will suffer for it. I totally understand why those guys at Armchair Linebacker were pissed off at me for lacking to show any passion when I wrote with so much on my other sites.

They were able to write with passion even thought their teams were losing and I was half assing while they were winning. If you're not feeling something then don't try to force yourself to do it, it ultimately won't work out. I finally quit Armchair Linebacker Sunday morning but they edited my final post that same afternoon. Rather than get mad & comment on it, I saw it & just laughed. This part of my life is called "happiness".

One.