I spent the last hour working on a rant about increasingly brazen government entities encroaching on our freedoms at every possible opportunity. Words like “fascist”, “pricks”, and a number of much less gentlemanly words starting with the letter “F” and rhyming with “Smuckers” were strategically interspersed. There was even a bizarre reference to pay-per-view goat-on-goat action. Such was my fury. (The rant had to do with the escalating assault on our freedoms while we're all distracted by war and stuff. The topic du jour was pr0n, and the Justice Department's recent admission that things on HBO and cable pay-per-view are going to be looked at closely to see if they are violating decency norms. This, on top of Stern, and gay marriage, and everything else we're being told we can't watch, listen to, or do, finally reached a boiling point with me. I'm the one who decides what I watch on my TV in my own home, not the fucking government. See, I'm nigh uncontrollable when I get going!)
But in the end, I chickened out, and deleted the entire thing. It makes me sad, but I did it. This is not the first time I have done this, and surely won't be the last.
While posting such a diatribe may have been a nice emotional release for me (and probably enjoyed by some percentage of my readership), my sometimes overboard rants are not what I want to be characterized by if some HR person looks me up on Google 10 years from now, doing a casual background check. I can't get the Google monster out of my head, ever since recruiters far and wide have come out and said “Oh yeah, we Google everyone we consider hiring”. Truth be known, I even almost deleted that part above about “pay per view goat-on-goat action“, since I just know that will come up in someone's search results and leave somebody somewhere with the impression that I'm into that sort of thing (not that there's anything wrong with that heh).
Yeah, I could stop Google from searching this page. But I don't really want to. Some of the things I write here I'm proud of, such as they are. There is a certain satisfaction seeing my blog come up as the second most popular website (out of 1.3 million search results) when you search Google for “best rock guitarist of all time“.
I think it's time to do a reality check, and decide what I'm really trying to get out of this site. Without my rants, and other random personal entries, this blog becomes little more than yet another boring echo chamber, like so many others. But at the same time, I don't want to endanger my career by saying something that could give some stick-in-the-mud HR person a reason to not forward my resume on to a hiring manager.
I'm going to go have a Fat Tire. Then I'll know what to do.