Monday, April 21, 2008

Five years of blogging

My blog's 5th birthday was on April 18th. Either Blogger didn't have post titles back then or I was refusing to use them. Blogger software was so ureliable I lost nearly the entire month of June '03. My blog had a different name.

I created the blog for the same reason as Tata; to keep from going crazy. I went crazy that year anyway, slowly, by increments I could feel & see, despite (or partly because of) the moderate daily dose of Zoloft I was taking at the time. The therapist I visited every other week was powerless to prevent it. I was occasionally hanging out & sleeping with a woman who listened to wingnut radio all day while she worked, a sure sign I was falling off the edge. I had a perverse fascination with the apathy she showed toward our relationship. It was the season of "Mission Accomplished." You couldn't dent the Executive Hubris with a sledge hammer. The president was more unhinged than I was.

I think about "upgrading" the blog & placing a banner graphic at the top. But I know it wouldn't increase the traffic. The blog template has so many small adjustments & tweeks that the entire structure could collapse. Why risk it when there's an empire of unprofessional webpages I have to maintain?

Yesterday, it occurred to me during a chat with a friend that I write better blog posts (in my judgment) while I'm reading better books. I tend to channel freshly implanted ideas & writing styles, which get run through the compound sentences I think of as "luncheonette counter talk" or "phone call paragraphs" or the more cryptic "radio segueways"- these categories are flexible. I challenge readers to find anything that reads like I've been drinking; "bar blab" has never been my thing. It's the responsibility of the editor to fix my writing, & I don't have one.

One reason I probably don't write much poetry is because prose disrupts my sense of poetic rhythm, which is very close to prose only slower. Syllables. I usually have to think about writing a poem exclusively for a least a a couple of days - go into training - before a poem discovers the synapses, & at that point I used to be able to write half-a-dozen keepers following the first attempt. This was one function of my old hard copy journals tapped out on a small Smith-Corona portable electric & then a Smith-Corona Data Disk word processor (I was loyal to the product, no Brother, IBM, or Royal on my desk). Those journals moved in & out of poetry. I even wrote poems in the middle of letters. Once the poems began coming, I could write them down on anything, anywhere. Sometimes it was like taking dictation.

Although I try to think of my blog as a journal or extended poem, I know it is neither. It lacks the emotionally naked obsessions of the former - a very private world, & the
let's take a little stroll
around the mental block

qualities of the latter.

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Comments:
Happy 5th Blogversary. My 3 year comes up on the 27th, and of course, you realize you were the inspiration for me to blog. Not in a personal way, but the fact that you blogged and I webbed (laughing, meaning I managed a website, not a blog) gave me the encouragement to start a blog. I remember your almost hissy fit when MyDD featured my first post, but I have since moved off of being a single issue blog like I was that first year, and am more a whatever is happening that day type of blog now. Plus, with all the groups joining into one, coupled with the ad phase, it really isn't possible for me to be on top of political stuff and break stories before the big conglomerate blogs do. Still, I read your blog every day. I too, don't want to upgrade the template. I've made too many tweaks to mine as well that I really don't want to have to start over with the tweaking and risk losing what I took so long to create in the first place.

Anyway, keep blogging. We will keep reading!
 
I did not throw a hissy fit. I'm only envious of authors who write bestselling detective novels, in one hour daily increments, one per year since they were 25 years old, & spend afternoons on the golf course. That beats the hell out of blogging.
 
Happy 5th! I just passed 3 years myself, on the 15th. I took a bit of a blogging break earlier this year and it's taken me a while to get back into it- maybe that was my stroll around the mental block.

I know what you mean about writing better when you read better.

BTW, changing the paint and the curtains may make it refreshing for a while, but it's not necessary. We'll still all drop by.
 
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