The Blog That Wasn’t There
Today we take a peek behind the blogger’s curtain. If we want to wax poetic, we could call it A Day In The Strife. Either way, this portends dust bunnies and little else of value.
House dust mites are ubiquitous everywhere humans live indoors. Positive tests for dust mite allergies are extremely common among people with asthma. Dust mites are microscopic arachnids whose primary food is dead human skin cells. They do not actually live on people, though. They and their feces and other allergens they produce are major constituents of house dust, but because they are so heavy they are not long suspended in the air.
Source: Wikipedia – Dust
Right out of the gate and a fascinating factoid already got slipped in. See? That’s the power of blogging. Take a deep breath and let’s begin!
An effective blog post requires several key components: A premise, a point of view, words, pictures and other things. That leaves me out. To that end I often find myself researching my own historical archive of posts. Perhaps I want to link a phrase back to something I wrote before. Perhaps I want to revisit a particularly riveting and interesting idea.
Remember, this is all theoretical.
If you’re like me, you got bedazzled and bamboozled by the sheer spectacle of the promised internet. It was going to be this shiny, vast repository of knowledge. It was somehow implied that this would be a Good Thing ™.
A big piece of this bamboozlement was the heralded “hyperlink.” This was going to be a little information workhorse that magically tied it all up, just like the Force binds you, me and the rock together. Unfortunately, it turned out that hyperlink was one of the most gamed inventions in human history and, even worse, had the lifespan of a fruit fly doing the backstroke in a bowl of malathion soup.
We interrupt this blog post to report that the dumb ass author prematurely pounded the Publish key quite by accident. This is another crucial part of blogging. It’s called The Instant Two Part post.
To be continued…
Abandonment Issues
It’s five minutes after my publishing deadline. I just abandoned the blog post I spent the whole day handcrafting as completely unacceptable. This is not good. Here in the Abyss we call this type of scenario Situation Normal.
Please pardon me while I vamp for a few minutes…
Things don’t always work out like we hope or think they should. Ya think?
This morning I encountered a particularly insidious form of online racism. It got to me so I decided to blog about it. My goal was to employ my usual deftness, sensitivity, style and grace while still getting across the raw sense of anger that consumed every fiber of my being like schools of cellular-sized piranhas in my bloodstream.
See? There I go again. Why do I always have to oversell my feelings? It’s almost as if my feelings matter. Let us not play games. We all know they don’t.
I was generally happy with the opening I had written. I even asked my wife to review it and she had high praise. “It’s not quite as bad as your usual garbage,” she quipped.
Wow. Things were looking up! Or so I thought.
Then it came time to actually say something. You know, the point of the whole exercise. KABOOM! That’s where the post jumped the shark, took a turn for the worse and shot off the rails. With extreme prejudice.
Thus, this post is not about racism. Not at all. I’ll have to leave that intellectual exploration to the successful version of me in the mirror universe. (It’s theoretically possible, I suppose.) Instead, let us change gears and talk about failure.
The number of posts I’ve abandoned exceeds what I’ve published. If that’s not true failure I don’t know what is.
At least there’s one thing I’m good at.
Too Many Words
Like Mozart with his “too many notes” I have been shamed by the assertion that my heretofore writings contain, and I quote, “Too many words.”
The charge, bitterly leveled by my otherwise serviceable spouse, had placed me in the uncomfortable position of scheming the proper retort.
Thus quote the author, “.”
Boom Shack-A-Lak Fireworks
Click for a blog explosion to delight the senses.
Stella! Another one of these damn awards jumped in front of my blog! Come out here! Help me take it in the house!
Well, I’ll be hornswoggled! I just won yet another award. We are now in danger of my trophy case generating a gravity field strong enough to implode upon itself and create a quantum singularity that sucks us all off. Oh, what the hell. I’m willing to risk it.
Today’s Blogging Fireworks Award comes to us from sunglasses model and long time bloggy friend Blogdramedy.
Someone told her once that the award exists “to honor the blogs that shock us, inspire us, touch us, or make us laugh.” And she fell for it!
You’re all invited to the After Party. Of course, here in the Abyss, we take the word “after” rather literally, if you know what I mean. So don’t be late for this date with destiny!
Note: This paragraph will end with an exclamation point. No real reason, really. I just want to do that three times in a row!
Now it is my solemn duty, as prescribed the official award rules, to tell you five “meaningful” things about myself and pay it forward to five other bloggers. Oh yes, you’ll very much want to stay tuned for that.
Continue reading →
Killing Time
Just how far am I willing to go for you, the intrepid reader? Oh how you’ve been made to suffer. I decided to do you a solid. Hey, it’s my way of saying thanks for being here. But how? Where and when?
The opportunity at time travel recently fell into my lap. The dictates of the space-time continuum prohibit me from saying how exactly, but I can say this much: It was a one-time opportunity and I take some time to think about how to use it wisely.
I proceeded with caution. After all, I wouldn’t want to be responsible for the utter destruction of the entire universe. At least that’s what I thought at the time. On second thought, it would get a bunch of assholes permanently out of my hair. Hmmm.
No! Don’t even think it! Stick to the objective. This is about my reader, not personal satisfaction. This is no time to be more narcissistic than usual.
Formulating a plan, I knew the limits of the trip. It would be a quick jump a mere 24 hours into the future. I’d literally be a man before my time. And I resolved to make the most of it.
There had to be a way to give my reader a little payback. I resolved to find a way how. If only I had more time…
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Fall Into Foul Blogs
Perchance I shall hawk Chevy Trucks anon, because my blog is steady as a rock.
Nay! That is not a good thing. Forsooth, a curse lies upon this keyboard, methinks.
There are, perhaps, more blog posts about how to blog effectively than there are American dollars comprising the U.S. deficit. I had come across several of these way back in the beginning and learned that if one wanted to grow a blog, a recommended tactic was updating your blog on a regular schedule.
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Shouts from the Abyss 
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