About Murphy’s Law

This blog is an attempt to engage with the world, while playing the truth of what I am.

The posts are categorized roughly by topic, such as music, sports, politics, literature, and film, as well as the very blog-like ruminations in real time. The entries can be searched by topic or month. A sample of somewhat representative offerings is listed below. Thanks for checking it out and feel free to drop me a line if you see something you like (or dislike). Some of these pieces found their way into my first two collections of non-fiction, Murphy’s Law Vol. One and Vol Two.

Bullmurph

The best way to understand the origins of this blog—and its odd name—is to remember that peculiar time, between the mid ‘90s and early aughts, when everyone began using the Internet, but blog (as noun and verb) did not yet exist in our lexicon. Enterprising sorts, who wanted to publish their thoughts on art, culture, politics and all-things-personal (TMI, via the selfie and social media post, also was yet to pollute our online currency), posted on personal web pages, eventually weblogs, and finally, blogs.

To self-publish online musings, circa 1996, one had to either fathom code or rely on a tech-savvy friend who did. As such, many early blogs were group efforts, compiling a variety of content which, in hindsight, was like reinventing the magazine for digital audiences. Needless to say, these efforts were technically and aesthetically primitive: no bells or whistles, no way to embed music or video (YouTube, too, was a ways off). Text-heavy and utilizing impossibly small font, these forums were run by nerds and, to contemporary eyes, looked about as advanced as prehistoric cave scribblings.

I worked at AOL, where many employees essentially got paid to be online guinea pigs, and I lived through a series of seismic tech innovations in real time (For more about this surreal time and place, check out my novel Not To Mention a Nice Life. I was also smart enough to surround myself with fellow travelers who navigated the weird wild web much more confidently and efficiently than I otherwise could. One friend (who knew more about computers a quarter century ago than I do, now) had what we’d now call a web presence and was interested in building what we’d now call a brand. He was creating, with the most rudimentary tools on offer, a website and his proposition was simple: if I provided content, he’d publish it. My byline, which would cover art and politics, was sardonically dubbed “The Running of the Bull.” A few years later, when I left the mothership of America Online, I surrendered my corporate email address. Thinking of content and brand, circa 1998, it made sense to become bullmurph (you can still reach me at bullmurph@aol.com). The blog bullmurph.com, which followed a decade later, was a no-brainer (thinking of brand and content, circa 2008), so when people ask, “Why bullmurph—and what does that mean?” I can answer, truthfully, “It doesn’t mean anything,” or, “It means everything.”