I don’t update this blog nearly as often as I used to (NEWS FLASH). This is my first post in two weeks, a nearly unprecedented lag, and whereas I used to average three or even four posts a week, I’m now down to—what, 0.3? Help me out, math geniuses.

Anyway, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time wondering about the reasons for these lapses. Here are some theories:

1. I’m busy.

2. I’m lazy.

3. Blogging isn’t the exciting, esoteric thing it was in 2002. It’s been fully mainstreamed and monetized. Even your mom knows what blogging is, and maybe she even has a blog (she doesn’t).

The blogosphere is oversaturated, mostly with blogs that no one reads, and the blogs that people do read aren’t this one. The The New York Times ran the numbers recently, based on data from Technorati, and found that there are between 7 and 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but only about 100,000 generate significant numbers of page views.

The world’s first blogs appeared in the mid-90s; I’d say we are now at the tail end of the first big wave of blogging, maybe even the second. Whatever comes next will separate the internetwheat from the internetchaff. (SPOILER ALERT: I don’t know what’s coming next. If I did, I’d have a million internetdollars.)

4. Of course, page views aren’t really my priority; if they were, I’d sell ads and blog about Top Chef and how Barack Obama isn’t an American citizen because he was born and raised on the moon, where the Illuminati trained him to do 9/11. My main motivation for blogging right now, even more than spouting off about David Foster Wallace and Why I Don’t Blog (meta!), is simply to keep this blog from joining the estimated 125 million blogs, out of 133 million, that haven’t been updated in the last 120 days.

5. That last reason isn’t a reason why I’m not blogging; it’s a few weak reasons why I still am. See? I can’t do this right anymore.

6. Another theory has to do with the fact that I now teach people how to blog. There’s probably a maxim along the lines of how when a hobby becomes a career, your passion for it weakens. I love teaching writing, and I love teaching people about blogging. But I still plan on sharing the above discouraging statistics with my students, and I will emphasize that one should probably not begin blogging solely to make money, or to generate page views. Those are unlikely, happy accidents, not guaranteed outcomes. So in my next session this fall I will be honest about my less frequent updates on this blog, and my crisis of faith regarding blogging in general. Last spring’s session renewed my love for blogging, maybe this one will actually inspire me to do it more regularly.

7. I’m out of ideas. Seriously. This probably isn’t a permanent thing, but right now all my brain space has been reallocated toward other things, like the classes I’m teaching, the band I’m in, my freelance assignments, the day job I hold down to actually support myself, and worrying about the fact that I haven’t done any creative writing since I finished grad school. (Notice that worrying about getting older isn’t on that list. I overcame that shit.)

8. I watch too much TV, even though I don’t own a television (thanks, Internet!). A lot of brain space has been devoted to True Blood, Weeds, and (soon!) Mad Men. Maybe I should blog about that. TV blogs are popular, right? (Oh, and also This American Life, the television version on Showtime, which you can watch on Netflix Instant and whose second season is probably among the best documentary filmmaking I’ve ever seen. I could blog about that, except whoops I just did.)

9. Twitter.

10. Twitter.

I do have a few ideas for blog entries, which I’d love to deploy within the next few days. If I don’t it’s because of reason #1 and especially #2. If you still read this blog, thanks. And sorry.