Who am I?

Welcome to the Fat Days. I’m your host.

The older I get, the clearer my internal answer is to that question, and the less I feel compelled to try to explain it to anyone else. Or maybe the story is harder to tell because it has more chapters. Let’s just say I’m Brian Marston and let my blog posts do the rest of the talking for now.

Why am I doing this?

It’s important to create and not just consume. I don’t like being a spectator. I want to be in the arena.

The magic of the web is that it allows anyone to add something to the flow of information. You don’t need a distribution company. This blog is my place to share thoughts that are bigger or longer lasting than a tweet or a status update. It gives me more control over the presentation. It’s fun and sort of daunting to have a new project where I make all the decisions and create all the content.

What’s the deal with “fat days”?

When I was in college, my future father-in-law used to say, “When the fat days come, all the people gonna dance and sing.” It caught my attention as a colorful turn of phrase. I assumed it was a common Southern idiom, but it doesn’t turn up in a Google search. (What does turn up in a Google search for “fat days” are a lot of women with body image issues.) My father-in-law was, improbably, a French literature major, so in his usage, “fat days” might also be a reference to the “week of the seven fat days,” the Catholic Carnival season that culminates in Mardis Gras (“Fat Tuesday”).

In any case, I registered fatdays.com to use for my personal site in 1996. I was in my twenties and doing web stuff, and like most people in their twenties doing web stuff back then, I had vague dreams of being a dot-com sellout at a young age. The plan was something like this: Make a lot of money; then do something fun that you really want to do. When the fat days come, all the people gonna dance and sing. But then I did a bunch of fun things with nonprofit organizations first, and I’m glad I did. It turns out you can skip the part where you have to make a lot of money and just do what you want to from the beginning, although it’d be nice to start making money one of these days.