Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a new blog. I know what you’re thinking, these things are a dime a dozen. Statistically, people start 492 blogs every 15 minutes. And you, the reading public, have plenty of options out there. You’ve got your blogging mommies. You’ve got your food bloggers. You’ve got your crafty bloggers. You’ve got your humorists who are far more humorous than I. You’ve even got video bloggers who are trying to lure your eyes away from the written word with fancy YouTube videos with cute children and funny felines and video game cut scenes. What sets this blog apart?

I’ll admit, that is a very reasonable question to ask. And I may not have a reasonable answer for you. Some people may drift over here from my old blog, Carp Dime. If you’ve done that, you’ll know I’ve been blogging for the last 10 years. For a while, I was a really regular blogger. New posts every single day. Recently, I’ve neglected to write as often as I once did, but that’s neither here nor there. Actually, it’s there. Specifically, over at Carp Dime. I should mention that I’m not allowing that blog to wither and die. I’ll still keep it running, but it will be specific in its content from now on.

Here at The Confusing Middle, you’ll find a lot of the same sorts of things you once found at Carp Dime. There will be attempts at humor and the confusion of written sarcasm along with witty anecdotes consisting of true stories and wild exaggerations.

Your next question, after wondering what sets this blog apart, will probably be, “The Confusing Middle? What does that even mean?” Well, I went through a lot of turmoil when trying to come up with a title for this thing. As my original blog was originally called The Single Guy, I thought it would be nice to go back to that. But The Single Guy has been taken. So have many variations on that title. Then I thought Carp Dime II or Carp Dime: The Sequel would be clever, since I knew it would be similar to the other Carp Dime. But it seemed kind of unoriginal.

So what is a blogger to do when his own creativity is tapped out? He gets by with a little help from his friends, of course. I took to the texting device and asked a small circle for some ideas. Those ideas were varied and nonsensical. The best of which were: Blacksburg Common, It’s Only Soup, Major Plot Holes of D2: The Mighty Ducks, An Incomplete History of Waffle House Bathrooms, The Ink Stained Teeth of Gabriel Martin, A Peck on the Chic, and It’s Pronounced Egregious. The Waffle House one almost won me over.

As it was, I went with The Confusing Middle, as you can clearly see. Its meaning? Life. I mean, the beginning of life is pretty well documented and understood by the vast majority of humans who reach a certain age. If you don’t understand the miracle of where babies come from, I feel like you should go talk to your parents and receive a lecture involving birds, bees, storks, and a cabbage patch, then you can come back and read the rest of this first, illustrious blog post. Anyway, the end of life is also fairly well documented. Sure, not all cultures or religions can agree on what they believe about the afterlife, but the end of life in this world pretty much has one option. Death. I promise, I’m not normally this morbid.

The Confusing Middle refers to the rest of life. Everything that comes between birth and death. It gets confusing, this middle part. Most of us do the best we can with what we have, but that doesn’t make anything any less confusing. So stay with me for future posts as I do my best to figure it out.