Sunday, February 26, 2006

I blog, therefore, I am (a geek)

I was sitting on a beerhall patio one friday afternoon in early 2002, nursing an Anchor and chatting with my new friend about this and that and random things.  She mentioned in passing that she’d written something about something on her.... her something, I didn’t catch exactly what.  I nodded into my beer and the conversation rolled along.  A few minutes later she mentioned it again and I called her on it.  “You posted it where?” “On my blog,” she explained with the patience with which one demonstrates superior sophistication to a small child with a learning disability.  She explained the phenomenon of having one’s own website, for sharing ideas and communicating with friends and even the occasional stranger.  I was intrigued.  She gave me her url and I checked it out the next day.  It was as she’d said, a simple static page of her thoughts, opinions, and self-expressions.  She occasionally linked up information from other sources, too, or a photo she’d found on the web.  I could even leave her a comment and join some sort of on-line conversation.  How very new millenium, I thought.  I was impressed. 

Over the next few weeks and months I started commenting regularly on her blog, and on a few others that sort of linked up with hers.  Many of these were run by her other drinking buddies, but some were from clear across the country and gave my blog-surfing a rather cosmopolitan air.  I started leaving longer and longer comments, until a few months later I realized that couldn’t keep monopolizing other people’s conversations from their comment boxes but had to start a blog of my own instead.  Blogger set me up with a no-frills account and a weird dystopian template, and I was off and running with short, strange posts that were to literature what exfoliation is to callused feet. 

I really enjoyed having this outlet for the foment of my mind, and as I went along I started making friends of my own - all imaginary, of course, restricted to the unreality of the computer screen, and all of us playing at blogging from across the country and around the globe.  It got to be quite a habit. 

Life ambled onward, as is its wont.  My writing got a bit wordier; my posts, more lengthy.  Some of my “imaginary” friends became quite important to me, even though I’d never met most of them.  The ones I did meet, however, were great people and confirmed the positive impression I’d formed of this new medium.  I blogged high and low, far and wide, and felt a real sense of community doing so.

It was also fun for me to find myself engaged, for a change, in a topical fad.  I’d lived through the summer of love but missed it completely; likewise the cb radio craze, the roller disco freakout, Melrose Place madness and cocaine mania.  I’d always missed the big social phenomena.  But here, I seemed to be on the leading edge of a very popular curve.  Within a few years blogs were everywhere and the curious cybertoy I’d embraced had become an important international phenomenon. 

As the same time, while a few of my imaginary friendships had become truly significant to me, even occasionally infringing into my “real” life, several of my original blog buddies began to ebb away over time.  With the first few, I noticed their absence but didn’t really feel it - the ‘sphere was crowded, and getting crowdeder.  As the ranks of ex-bloggers continued to grow, though, I started feeling as if quitting blogging was the new blogging.  It came to pass that many of my original crowd of drunk blog friends stopped maintaining their sites, and, in an unrelated development, I stopped hanging out with them so much.  As for the others, I found myself sometimes actually losing interest in meandering reportage and rants and harrangues and nonsensicalities.  I had enough of my own to work with. 

Recently I noticed that the woman who’d first told me about blogging hadn’t updated her site for five months.  Over the years I’ve had to switch out most all my links when other people had called it quits.  Several of my remaining favorite sites go months now without new material, leaving me to wonder if I should still keep them among my list of links.  I can’t keep up with most of the others that provide new material regularly.  I rarely comment anymore, and rarely get many comments on my own blog.  Besides that, traffic at my site has been, as of early 2006, on a slow but steady decline.  My parents give me more feedback on this blog than my friends, real or imaginary.  I dont’ know what this community is anymore, or even if it is.

So what’s this all about for me now?  It’s a question I’ve had to think through carefully.  I didn’t start writing when I started blogging - I’d been doing little essays and poems since grade school.  When I look back on them, thumbing through the drawers of stale paper and longhand scrawls, I’m struck by the quantity of material, and how awful most of it is.  Self-indulgent, sappy, clumsy and pointless, almost every page is a lesson in shoddy writing.  And that was fine, because no one but me would ever read any of it.  But here on this site in its various incarnations, I’ve known that other eyes will see my work, and see it as an end product, a piece of literature or at the least of creative expression, not juust as the sublimation of some random burst of mental energy I needed to disperse before I could fall asleep. 

In a sense, having readers I can no longer identify and whom I often don’t know, even if there aren’t many of you, compels me to write better sentences, urges me to find a more meaningful point to make or at least a joke that’s worth your time to read.  My success, I see when I look back over the archives, has been uneven - sometimes I feel like I’ve really articulated something that could have value, even if only entertainment value, which sometimes is value enough; sometimes I’m embarassed by what I’ve somehow deemed fit to post and I can only bear not to delete it because it provides an instructive example to me of my own vanity and hubris. 

But I do know, by the very nature of the internet, some people will stumble across the words I post, just as I know my own nature well enough to be sure that these ideas will keep clamoring in my mind to be reduced to writing.  If I am going to keep writing, I can use this site as a tool to hone my work, so that I can embarass myself minimally and offer the greatest possible incentive for you to return again to read more.  The community I had imagined myself to be a part of may yet exist, or maybe it never really did.  But the constructive value of parading my naked soul here before you has only grown more powerful for me over time.

So, I am drawn to conclude, I write to satisfy some internal compulsion over which I seem to have no control.  I blog because it forces me to give the product of that compulsion greater clarity, better structure.  If I am to tramp around naked in public, I should at least have the decency to present my best aspect.  It is your critical derogation or approbation that provides the whetstone to whatever skill I possess. I respectfully thank you for the motivation towards improved writing.  I will try not to let you down too often.