Thursday, May 08, 2008

My oddly successful failure as a blogger

Is there a way to cure yourself of writing, to the exclusion of job and housework, just to see your words served to a planet in need of almost everything but more words? What is it that addicts me to this blogging?
  • I dearly love the occasional kind word from my readers.
  • I have a sense of responsibility toward the people whom google sends my way for answers not about underwear. Yeah. Imagine it. Me the expert.
  • Writing as sport and craft always was and still is fun though I do it badly.
  • No better way to explore one's lack of oneness, to experiment with expression for all the altered egos and subpersonalities. You need an escape from sticking to the fixed and consistent person a boss, a spouse or a customer expects or demands.
  • Writing out who I am so I can be that person, articulate that person...and maybe someday be reminded who I was.
  • Community. Odd actually since I am pathologically coy about my real identity, but aside from my work with MoveOn, and a former turn in trail biking advocacy, I don't meet or mingle with people who share my causes. Blogging has changed that albeit at the remove of a mask.
  • Some kick-ass thinkers to look up to, and to berate as well. And quite a few of even the busiest of them will reply to you when you get on their wavelength.
  • Some would disagree with this but I have learned things about politics, the psychology of online communications and some economics...It was high time I did know more about these things. If you don't learn them you remain a boor and a bore and are stuck at the rung of verbal poo flingers.

If I could confine my news addiction and windy bouts of self expression to a harmless few hours a week like any other well behaved hobby, why would I not otherwise carry on in the manner I have with this blog?
  • My posts grow to three pages and seem unfinished, words come oozing out, no natural end of rewriting seems to come...I still look back and wish I had said less and not wasted words on the topic of the moment. Such topics go stale even when they are good illustrations for the bigger themes I was really and always hunting.
  • I am not connected to rare insider news sources, not up at all hours. I am fond of sunshine and strenuous exercise, idiosyncratic in speech and logic and crappy with deadlines since I take a lapidary approach to sentence construction. That makes me a complete misfit for DailyKos, Agonist, TPM or HuffPo though I click on them a dozen times a day. And going it on my own is....well, you are looking at it.
  • My hit counter is a one-way mirror in which vanity makes me compulsively gaze as if hypnotized. It tells me a little about you but of me it only says "attachment to illusion of self". The vast majority of hits are Google touching a page because in so many pages whatever words you seek are here but always in a strange order and a perverse usage. By the accident of my blogs name, 2/3 of my traffic. The scary thing is finding 80% of my hits are hit-and-run Google references but ET is often middle of the first page or higher. How can a blog few link, or read have a page rank of 5?
  • A blog for each interest has not worked. A catchall where you cannot reliably find your interest pursued has not worked. And I have spared you my poetry for the most part. Somebody already invented the "blog about nothing" so what is this and what is the point of it?
  • Temporal tyranny of the treadmill. Even your best post simply disappears as and old post.
  • To build a readership would take time I do not have. To do less is mere vanity and the love of ones own words echoing in an empty room.
  • By the accident of my blog's name, way too much of a kind of traffic I really do not want [imaged lest it prove NSFW]:


So, I need to make a few changes. For now, the name changes. That will mess with people who remember page title but not the URL, and rely on google to connect the DNS dots. That won't be many. The URL stays the same. But maybe I stop getting 45 of my 50 daily hits from porn seekers.

1 comment:

cul said...

Why do I blog?

Before blogging I kept private daily journals which contain snapshots of my evolution. Sometimes when I look back to the earlier years, say 1968, I find myself wondering who the hell I was to be thinking such things. In that sense the journal writing and the blogging provide the present me a sense of change and at the same a picture of the cycles I am caught up in which appear through persistence over time.

I've pretty much given up on the vanity element since I don't keep track of stats and don't care if people comment, though I enjoy that people do. I am pleased that the comments I get are nearly perfect in the sense that the people who comment are the ones whom I already have a great respect and love for. Communication is a lovely thing.

I don't blog with the expectations of being an agent of change except perhaps by accidental example. I look at my blog as a heads up magazine of what articles and ideas interest me and I feel should be preserved and pushed as memes and stuffed into my personal time capsule.

Its probably better that I shriek my protestations about political and social injustices on line than from some physical soap box so that I take the edge of dinner conversations with family.

I do care about the state of the world and it constantly overwhelms me. If I didn't blog I would probably already be dead or incarcerated for climbing over the White House fence with a weapon.

But I sense in you some deeper equation roiling your waters, beyond even what you have said in this post.

And oh yeah, mask or no, I still have felt the "real" you behind your words.