Angry Robot

caesar

What with it being a year since I started doing the Caesar weblog, I’ve been thinking about that whole thing a fair amount. It’s a very strange thing, that thing I do. When people ask me about it they say “how’s Caesar doing?” and I respond, “he’s fine, he did [this or that].” It’s a strange thing, to get into character for 15 minutes a day. I’ve been treating him like a separate person. And when it comes to the site, I try to stay in character as well. He only allows comments on certain posts, when I imagine he might actually care what people think about something – for example, he wants to hear all manner of praise for having done the site for a year. I took out a MeFi text ad for him, and I phrased it as I thought he might: fluid, simple, somewhat pompous, with typical Caesar sentence structure (Latin-style), the verb delayed as long as possible.

There’s a lot of things that I should improve about his site, but frankly much of the time he’s just a pain in the ass. Aw fuck, I think, I’ve got to update Caesar again. But I keep doing it; and other times it borders on the rewarding, and sometimes even crosses right over into “shucks, this is fun” territory.

Shortly after starting the site I realized it’s not really a weblog at all, rather a journal, but I felt it was too late to change. I resent that now. And sometimes I resent how long it will take – at the rate I’m going (4:1 time compression) I will be doing this for three more years. Damn, I need to pick up the pace!

But as I say, there are fun moments. I like getting mail from highschool students asking for help with their Caesar-related papers. I like the other D getting excited when Caesar links to him. I like other people contacting me about doing other historical weblogs (although I don’t like that they never seem to stick it out. Persistence, people!). I like the odd mention in obscure newspapers.

Yet I worry that the project is at best an obscure one; that I am at best a person obsessed with the obscure; that I am doomed, at best, to spend my life wallowing in obscurities. While people like Caesar are out there taking over the world. Ah, the lament of the third-rate biographer.

But. To flip flop again. (And to move from the position of biographer to that of third-rate motivational coach.) As I tend to say about smoking: I’m not a quitter.