Justifying a Title Change

Here's the problem with blogs... OK, there are a lot of problems with blogs, but here is the one that concerns me right now: every blog name is silly, unforgivably and ridiculously silly.  I guess you can name the blog after yourself but unless you're name is Chuck Klosterman or Donald Miller who are you to think that anyone is going to be drawn in by name recognition?  So you go with some abstraction, some concept that tries to define what the blog is about for readers, usually going with some hopeful book title or something like that. 

A book title can be highly conceptual without coming across as pretentious because the title speaks to the concept of the book, not the writer.  But a blog always speaks about the writer, because its not some self-contained thing with a beginning and an end but a potentially endless string of thoughts built over years.  So attaching a title to the blog is in essence an attempt to define one's self.  And there is no way to do that without being pretentious.
I have hardly ever been directed to a person's blog without first rolling my eyes at their blog's name, and this includes my own.  Well, there is one, http://www.staircasewit.co written by a girl I went to college with, which I really like but that's because she's a good writer and she is witty, so the title isn't promising anything more than it delivers.  Plus it's clever word play.  Beyond that most of them are ridiculous, and that's OK. As long as we understand that and ascribe to the titles as much as they deserve: nothing. 

When I started writing a blog it was because I wanted to write and I thought if I had people to who would read my writing (without having to awkwardly track people down and asking them to read my writing) I would be motivated to write more.  So I sat down at my computer and got ready to go and realized I needed a title.  Something... anything... just to get me started on actually writing.  I thought of a poem I had recently written from a lecture I had heard and then Nietzsche's Madman was born and I have hated it ever since.  It's a ridiculous title; actually I kind of like it but I was never able to communicate what I meant by it, and people never fully understood.  So people thought I was some Nietzsche expert or admirer of his when really I found very little of what he ever had to say interesting.  I knew it was out of control when I was getting 2am text messages asking for help from fellow students on essays they were working on.  I tried explaining to people that I just found his one character of the madman/prophet interesting, that I didn't think I was the madman nor was I trying to be him.  But it was no use, I had connected myself with a philosopher that Christians were needlessly afraid of and ascribed to myself the title of his tragic prophet.  How pretentious is that?!  And I didn't even realize I was doing it when I picked that title.  I just thought the poem was half-decent so why not name a blog after it.  And so it goes. 

So with that it's time for a change in the hopes of steering away from those problems and prepare myself for a set of new ones.  The title Thus Spake the Fork isn't any better than the last or any less pretentious and silly, but it will do.  It simply connects two ideas: 1) my favorite essay title "Thus Spake..." and 2) Kierkegaard's childhood nickname.  Yes, the reference to Kierkegaard is equally as pretentious and inexcusable as any blog title in existence, but at least its not as overt.  Hopefully that will be enough for you not to hold that reference against me. 

Now time to get back to writing more than just a single article every four months.