What's the Blog About, Alfie?

After the wonderful events of this past weekend, I was despondently thinking about the drop in readership that I could look forward to in the coming days when, as has been the case many times, the Critic came to my rescue:

(The Critic): Where's that $5 you owe me? (Me): Can't you see I need a moment? (TC): What's the matter now? (M): I lost 1/3 of my readers! (TC): So? (M): That's a huge portion! (TC): That's only 1 person. (M): Hmmm…you have a good point. Yeah I feel much better! (TC): Now where's that $5?

And so I realized that, of the goals or hopes that I had for my miserable blog, I had only met one of them:

• Reasoned Discussion
• Notoriety
• To Write

Reasoned Discussion

As I may have blathered about already, one thing I would really like to get out of this blog is a thoughtful discussion or exchange of ideas. For example, here's an idea for truth vs. honesty. What does everyone else think? How about income taxes? Does anyone see that has a form of community service?

The utter lack of response or even evidence of thought of any kind has been most depressing. Am I the only person who thinks about this stuff? There must be at least one other person out there who does. All I can say is that there sure isn't any evidence of them as far as my blog goes.

There also doesn't seem to be any evidence of them as far as other people's blogs go either. Looking around, it seems like most of the blogs don't talk about anything like this. Issues of the day and sex seem to dominate the blogosphere.

The antithesis of this whole notion is the flame war: two or more people running what amounts to a crummy game of "the dozens" going back and forth, wasting time. I've seen my share of these things in various venues over the years. An interesting flame war can be entertaining, like the famous, multi-year Derek Smart ones that come complete with guides on how to start it up again (mention attacks from a soda vending machine). But in the end, these things really are a waste.

Notoriety

This went out the window so quickly it made my head spin. I tried a few things, like Blogexplosion, and discovered that there were very, very few people that were interested in anything I had to say. Looking at the popular sites I noticed that they a) had sexy pictures and b) went to a lot of trouble promoting themselves.

Being a basically lazy person who is only messing with this stuff for the hell of it, the second option was not really possible for me. I don't really know why I don't post pornographic pictures on my site to attract traffic. Maybe I'm too proud (irrationally I might add). Maybe it's because I don't think people who are interested in porn are going to bother with the other aspects of the blog.

Writing

Throughout my life I have always enjoyed writing. Not technical, book report kind of stuff, but fiction for the most part and then perhaps philosophical kind of stuff.

From a practical standpoint, it also has a number of benefits such as getting me out of my mad, chicken-like mind for a little bit every day. The blog venue is particularly good for this because there is a sort of implied schedule, a pressure to publish every other day or so.

The blog approach's time-oriented nature also tends to curb my tendency towards procrastination and perfectionism. The thing is that you need to produce something; you can't wait for it to be perfect.

Conclusion

So there you have it. Of the things that I set out to do with this blog, I've only achieved one of them. The odd thing to me is that, depressing and humiliating though it may be, failing on the other two points is not quite as bad as I thought it would be, but that's the topic for another post.

Tags: Gollum, despair, purpose, writing, notoriety, reasoned discussion

Sources:

• "Gollum" Image from "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers" property of New Line Cinema/Wingnuts, JRR Tolkein, etc.