Blogging has become a remarkably addictive activity for me, particularly given certain recent events in my life. Part of the reason is that I like to stay up far, far past my bedtime, and inevitably around three or four in the morning I want to talk to someone. Most of my friends would gnaw out my liver if I called them up at 4 am just to shoot the shit (what a bizarre colloquialism. I keep seeing the two guys from Brokeback Mountain, taking pot shots at piles of cow dung), so blogging becomes my proverbial hole in the ground. Unlike Midas' hairdresser, however, I remain keenly aware that there are actually people reading this. Maybe that's why I like it - I kind of feel like I'm actually reaching out and touching someone, except without the molestation charges. Hah! I kid. The only person I've ever molested in public is Chuckles, and I only did that with my eyes. (Didn't know about that, did you Chuckles? I'm going to get that tattoo someday. You know which one I'm talking about...)
Back to the topic at hand. It's curious - if I really only wanted to write about how I feel or otherwise express myself, I could easily just make a word document and spill as much as I want on there. I don't even necessarily have to worry about spelling or punctuation or capitalization or anything like that. I could just unwind, and...talk, about anything at all. (Yes Dave, I can actually write without necessarily capitalizing and punctuating everything. I might even misspell a word or two here and there. Try not to faint.) If all I wanted is a hole in the ground, then I could easily make something totally private, for no other purpose than to let my fingers rattle over the keys. Something to let me relax as the words just dribble out of my fingers. It might be even more therapeutic, in a way.
And yet, here I am, again and again, rattling off words to my unseen, unknown audience hidden in the dark. It's like I'm standing on a stage, flooded in a cold wash, and all I can see is the white projector light reflected off the back of my audience's collective heads. A sea of anonymous faces sitting in the shadows. Well that can't be entirely accurate, can it? I have a supposition about who reads what I write - I assume its people on my friends list. I've already addressed two of my oldest friends, but for all I know they pay no attention whatsoever to what I'm writing. At least one of them, after all, only put up a Myspace page because his brother hacked his computer. It's not simply a matter of talking to my ideal audience member (and the old goat does get rather boring after a while. You can only hear "Hrmmmm" and "I see" so often before you want to whack the guy with a keytar.) It's...knowing that there's someone out there, reading and relating, perhaps. Maybe it satisfies my need to stand on a soapbox and be heard, every now and again (or every twenty hours or so). The internet is undoubtedly one of the best media for such a thing nowadays. (Parentheses are fun! I love parentheses! I can digress and go all sorts of places inside a pair of parentheses! It's like having a totally random subroutine sitting in the middle of otherwise very clean code! It's like, while the program is in the middle of calculating, say, the optimal shape of a low speed wind tunnel contraction, it suddenly comes across a subroutine that screams, "I demand that you output rows and rows of pickles to the screen!" And the program can be all, "WTF?! No!" but it can't resist the power of the subroutine, who can totally bitch-slap it and go, "Ho! Give me pickles!" And voila! In the middle of a wind tunnel contraction you suddenly have rows and rows of pickles. But only briefly, because then the subroutine ends, and you're back to something that makes sense.)
I was tempted...almost tempted, for a moment there, to ask "Who are you people? Who is actually reading this? What is it that brings you back here, if indeed you're a regular reader?" Well, hmmmm...I guess in stating my intent not to ask the question I've actually rather asked the question, haven't I? Aren't I a tricky fellow? Do I really want to know? Should the house lights come up, and reveal just who is sitting in the seats? Part of me says yes, but part of me is going, "What if you end up with an utterly creepy man in, say, a bunny suit?" I have, mind you, no particular onus against bunny suits, excepting possibly the one from Donnie Darko, but...come on, a grown man in a bunny suit? In a dark theatre? Are you telling me that you don't find the idea completely skeezy? But then, maybe that man is actually Ricky, who can pull off such things without being creepy, because he's just that kind of guy. See? I can suppose all I want, but until I have confirmation, my audience remains whoever I think it is. Maybe that's a good thing.
I was feeling rather...sad isn't really the word for it. A sense of longing for something far, far away is probably the best way to describe it. Perhaps it is the sensation that a cow gets when it looks up at the moon, and knows that although music and literature makes it sound terribly simple, it's really a logistical nightmare for an 1,100 pound mammal to clear 238,000 miles of dense atmosphere and hard vacuum, then return to the earth intact. Not only is there a lot of equipment involved, but it doesn't even know how the moon feels about such an endeavor. But that doesn't stop it from wanting to try. God, how it wants to try.
At least the silverware's getting laid tonight.
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