Friday, May 28, 2004

The Power of Blog Compels You

(Caveat: You know, I hope, that this isn’t about you. I mean, except for the part where I say how cool you are.)

I find new sites all the time that are witter and more current, wiser and more touching and goddamned funnier than I could ever hope to be, other sites that kick my ass and hand it back to me in a hefty bag, with comments up in the 70s or 90s or higher on every post and a link list of geniuses and international bon vivants, a rarified world in which I could never really even imagine myself participating.... and I think, there are so many of them out there, so clever and savvy, tweaking things on their sites that I don’t even know exist and still putting more meaning and entertainment in a 50 word post than I can eke out of 500.... and I come back here to the ‘hut with its pages on pages of tired white text, its worn old voice and the smattering of comments I glean from those few among my occasional visitors who are charitable enough to cast a word or two in my direction.... sometimes I truly feel, when I see the first comment on a post I really liked coming on line hours - many hours - after it’s been published, that I’m just getting a “pity comment” from some gracious visitor empathetic enough to be chagrined at the total lack of feedback.  I know, it’s neurotic, but that’s where I go sometimes these days.

Then I think of some blogging friends I thought I used to have, and whatever once stood for a relationship between us is just gone.  My comments on their sites resound like hollow echoes and their comments on mine have evaporated entirely, their hits soaring as mine slowly dwindle. I can’t help but feel a bit jealous, resentful, covetous, petty as the tide surges forward, carrying further they who were once my peers but now outpace me; meantime, I drift slowly backwards into a murky unknown, where my talents are ordinary at best and my words shatter brittle in the night air, leaving no more impression than the shadow of glass. It leaves me wondering why I do it. 

But then I remember: there was no choice, I never decided.  I always wrote.  I wrote all through school - bad poems and long unsent letters, illuminated doodles, fables, jokes; I developed a sense of rhythm that demanded satisfaction and a love of words that I needed to feed, and the pages filled notebooks and the notebooks filled boxes before I finally confronted the fact of my addiction to rearranging words and got myself this journal to stoke my jones.

This medium of blogging brings many diverting novelties to my writing experience, and it’s easy for me to confuse these with the real reason I write.  But this site is not about the comments, the hits, the geeky tweaks or the purported social status inherent in my links list.  If it turns out I’ve alienated every damn person I thought was my friend on line, I regretfully accept it but I will still go on.  I’m not doing this for them.  I’m not even doing it for me.  I’m doing it because I can’t not do it.  I just write.  I just do.  This site helps me hone that craft as best I can: compels me to produce my best work according to my own standards, to extirpate typos and to refine my prose.  It’s nice to hear from people who visit here but I must finally embrace the fact that we are all bystanders at this trainwreck. It was going to go down anyway; the ‘hut just happens to have been fortuitously located so as to provide a convenient vantage point from which to view the carnage.  That is, if you are of a mind to do so.  But either way, the writing will just go on.