Listen to my words

Why write?

Saturday, July 30, 2005

I felt like writing something which at least had a remote possibility of being read by someone. So, I pondered the subject and in a stroke of genius I decided that this blog-entry should be about blog-entries and the why behind them. That means this entry will be self-referential and full of itself, consider yourself warned.

For the sake of my self-indulgence, let's ignore the fact that this page is not among the 8058044651 pages that Google examine. It is not being linked to by any other pages (except for a forum I frequent where I have this page in my signature). It's not likely that someone will type in this url by chance, unless it's a monkey (obscure reference) and in that case it will just trash my comments section. The page hasn't had that many visitors (22 to be exact) and I often write in a preachy, know-it-all kinda way. I call it catchy, informative, writing with a twist (best served while heavily intoxicated).

I have a few comments on some of my posts and those came by when I had an egomaniacal fit and forced my friends to comment on some of the stuff I'd written, so that I can pretend to have an audience while I'm playing with my dolls (I don't play with dolls, they're called "Action Figures").

I actually don't have any kind of audience, at least not one which is here by their own free will. With this dismal amount of visitors, why do I keep writing? I like to write. It's yet another way to communicate. And it's more expressive than, say, smoke signals or morse code. Or no, it's not, it's just as expressive -- and faster. Having an audience, even a small audience of maybe two or three people would be interesting if there would be some kind of dialogue. But since I tend to write longish entries about whatever I happen to pull out of my Bag o'Subjets that day, I think I confuse people.
What is this blog about? It's about me. It's about me and what I think about things that I find interesting.

I've looked at a number of blogs and many of them only contain information about what the author has done during a day. It's often written like a summary for a movie but with all the boring details left in. Example:

I woke up when Dorothy started singing about rainbows. It was raining
outside. I walked Toto, our dog. When I came in she wanted me to buy groceries. I went to the store and bought milk, two loafs of bread, butter and a pair of ruby shoes for Dorothy. After that I went to my workshop and worked for four hours. Then I got bored and went to bed and slept for two hours.
I dreamt about winged monkeys.
Dorothy woke me up and thanked me for the shoes. We ate dinner and went to bed again.

What is important and interesting about what happens to people is what the person thought at that moment and what the person thinks about it in retrospect. The event itself is often uninteresting unless it's something really strange like UFO's, flying monkeys or world peace.
Imagine a movie without a main character. We just see people go about their daily business. It would be boring and it would be pointless, much like some of the blogs out there. I hope what I write isn't pointless or boring, and I can understand if someone thinks this is pretentions bullshit, who knows, you might be right. But it's me and I like to write, and I have a tendency to write too much even though I try, I really do, to keep it as short as possible.

Be deep, be thoughtful, be tolerant, Be Cool, because sometimes the writer can't find a fourth wall.

posted by Richard @ 04:27