Drunken Notions

I used to swear I would never blog personal shit, but I guess I've failed to live up to that commitment for some time. Nonetheless, I will spare the occasional passerby the trials and tribulations of my most recent interesting (in the Chinese sense) life chapters, and simply say that the political is indeed the personal, and one day I will have my revenge. Even if revenge takes the form of folding my hands primly against my defeated body and saying, finally, "Fuck it, life is too short to obsess over other people's petty meannesses---let the cosmos deal with it."

If you only just tuned in, this makes no sense to you. That is my gift to you. In the meantime...

It occurred to me that I used to blog about things that mattered to me, even if they might have been completely off the radar. Now, since I started writing for higher-profile blogs, I've felt tempted to write about the things that everyone else is talking about, because after all, if everyone else is blogging it, it must be what people want to read, and it will be what rises to the top of the Google pile. Which shames me into remembering why I started this in the first place: to blow off steam, and put my ideas in order and maybe try to think a little more clearly...none of which has anything to do with seducing other people into reading what I write. Yet there it is. Even the little interest that's been stirred by what I write has tainted my stuff with ambition. And it gets all mixed up with the legitimate desire to be heard and maybe make a little bit of difference, of wanting to be a conduit for information and knowledge, which inevitably leads to a confusion of intent and the rationalization of less-than noble methods. I really never wanted that. Maybe I took on too much in accepting offers to add my voice to bigger blogs, and the whole gestalt suffers as a result.

So much emphasis is put on getting readership, and mentions in the Daou, and getting noticed by the big fish, that I wonder if we haven't become one giant echo chamber, blatting the same old shit around day after day, and mentally masturbating to the porn of the most recent David Brooks column or the latest outrage from the West Wing (God knows, there are so many). This, too, is not a new observation, but really...what's it all for? Isn't life too short to waste screaming into the void or preaching to the converted?

You write something that seems to have great significance, and even may point out something you haven't yet read elsewhere, and who gives a shit? Then you post a picture of some totally irrelevant triviality, and the hits just keep on coming. You start to get the sense that even progressive thinkers are prone to the old bottom-line, lowest common denominator of pop culture attractions, and you may just as well post pictures of two-headed calves and gruesome stories of freak accidents. Maybe I'm just giving in to the stubborn old cynic in me that I've never been able to kill off, and this is just a test of my resolve.

How well can I hold to my own voice and keep from giving in to the inner pressure to do safe, familiar things, things that many others do and do better? I guess time will tell. In the meantime, I have to live with some erratic posting and some personal baggage creeping into the work I do post. And I want to re-commit to writing things that interest me, not the random troller, while acknowledging that I do have a few readers that have pulled me into being part of a community whose give and take I greatly enjoy. You know who you are. Thanks.

P.S.--I wasn'r really drunk first thing on a Sunday morning...it just took me awhile to finally post this. Not that there's anything wrong with that.