Social networking sites work counter to that old Groucho Marx/Woody
Allen joke, about not wanting to belong to any club that would have you
as a member. The Internet is all about context. You are who you friend.
MOLI and Facebook are both supposed to be havens from MySpace, for
“grownups” who think MySpace is for teenagers. But SNSes only succeed
if they have that critical mass of users who attract other users.
They’re like giant high school cliques; people only want to hang out in
the ones where the people they want to hang out with are.

In his "Wk 52 -- self-ish" blog post for MOLI, the poet Mike Tyler
discusses his own reasons for blogging much better than I do:  “I like
Moli because it is new and growing and I like things at the beginnings
like Silent Movies, and Early Rock ‘n Roll (when the electric guitar
was just invented), and any kind of stuff that is going on before
grown-ups find it and begin their jihad. (Look out for the word-ish,
‘monetize.’)”

Tyler has been posting one blog a week under the profile name nyc boi for one year, every Sunday morning – hence the blog name, sunday am.
I first met Mike when he was a poet hanging out at spaces like the
Nuyorican Poets Café and ABC No Rio back in the early '90s, and made
him the lead subject of a story I wrote for The Village Voice
in '91: "Café Society." We’ve been friends since, and when he found out
I was hired by MOLI some 52 weeks ago, he decided to make it a place to
hang his own words.

sunday am can be a tough, trippy,
tripping, hilarious, profound read. Mike has always been a philosopher
as well as a writer, and sometimes you have to follow his punning
neologisms – words like “somethinc,” “humane bean” -- back to their
etymological source (Mike’s brain) to make sense of him. I always find
the investigation worth the wade.

In "self-ish," Tyler – who
made a name/spectacle of himself as a globetrotting performance poet
back when spoken word was the MTV rage – in typical Tyler fashion,
finds he has no lessons to share from his first year in a new medium:
“I’ve had words of wisdom about blogging, before I did it, and now that
I’ve done it, I have not one jot (whutz a jot?) more than I started.”

But
of course, Mike does have something profound to say about blogging, and
it has to do with landing where your feet find themselves – monetizers
beware and be damned. Like Juliana Luecking, Donnell Alexander, Wendy Case, Natasha Bright, Jana Martin, Jeanne Fury, Cathay Che, Audra Hodges, Neal Pollack, Martin Johnson, Richard Pachter, Rob Levine, Celeste Fraser Delgado, Rebecca Wakefield, Erika Schickel,
and [your name here], nyc boi is the kind of person I want to hang out
with, virtually or otherwise. As long as they’re here, I’ll be here.