The whole blogging thing

While I feel like I've got a more-than-adequate understanding of the blog phenomenon, there's a part of me that thinks I can't claim to understand it thoroughly unless I've had a "personal" blog running for a while. I have had other, topic-specific blogs online from time to time, but never a general-purpose meandering blog.

Why haven't I done this before? Basically, two conflicting fears:

1) I don't want to prove myself to be one more person with nothing new to say
2) If I have do something new to say, I don't want somebody else to steal it.

It's a bit of a quandary. I want to blog something of substance, but I'm afraid that if I do post something of substance that it'll appear somewhere else on the web under somebody else's name. But I'm also afraid I won't really have anything of substance to post in the first place.

Perhaps I should make this a blog of my concerns, fears, and things I worry about. I have a tendency to look for the worst-case scenario in everything. The other day I was asking myself why I do this, why it's easier for me to visualize something really terrible happening than something really fantastic. And I realized it's because when you imagine something horrible, and you make yourself stop imagining it, there's a great rush of relief when you acknowledge it wasn't for real. ("Why did the little moron beat his head against the wall? Because it felt so good when he stopped.") Whereas when you imagine something wonderful happening, sooner or later you have to come back to reality and discover that it never happened.

Oh, I do often visualize myself in *realistic* good situations - succeeding in things, whatever - I'm talking about spectacular events of one kind or another. I can imagine them just fine but I make myself stop before I get too caught up in it, or convince myself that it's real.

But I've wandered off topic. Why am I blogging? Do I want a public diary? Is this an experiment? I think it is.