BLOG ME WITH A SPOON

NOTES FROM THE HENGE

A man who was luckless at snogging

Decided to try out this “blogging.”

And now he is known

(In the blogosphere zone)

For his snoring and comforter hogging.

BLOG ME WITH A SPOON

So I’m on top of this whole blog thing now.  This is me, blogging.  Doing it.  Yeah.  Going all bloggy on the internet’s ass.  Cutting edge, that’s me. 

I’m only, what, 15 years late?

My wife makes fun of me because I can’t even use the freakin’ expression properly.  If she makes a particularly cogent comment about pistachio gelato or Olympic curling or the like, instead of asking her, “Why don’t you post about that on your blog?” I’ll say, “Why don't you write a blog about that?”  And I’ll get the “you’re sweet, but kind of an idiot” look I know so well after twenty-odd years of marriage. (And, yes, some of those years were very odd.  But I digress.)

No matter how often I misuse the B-word and am corrected with a loving glare, for some reason my frontal lobes refuse to stop making those kinds of old fart “blog me about it when you get to Reno” mistakes in usage.  Why?  Maybe the very same reason I’ve resisted starting a blog for so long.

The-thing-of-it-is is, is that I just don’t wanna.  Or at least just didn’t wanna until today.  Blogs, it seems to me, are mostly – let’s face it – about the comments section.  If you don’t get any comments, you suck.  You’re a friendless loser.  You threw a party and nobody showed up.  You built a baseball diamond and they didn’t come.  You held a parade and were left alone in the middle of Main Street, gripping your own sweaty baton.  On the other hand, if you get lots and lots and lots of comments, odds are they’re mostly spittle-freckled rants about how very wrong you are.  And how you should probably eat poop and pass away… or just head off somewhere and make sweet love to yourself.  Or words to that effect.

Look, I find I even run into this kind of “comment thread issue” on Facebook.  If you scroll down my Facebook homepage you’ll find years and years of daily status updates going back to when I first joined up in an era when computers were still hand cranked.  You’ll note that almost every one of those posts is a joke.  A silly attempt at humor.  No politics, no religion, no diet advice.  Nothing controversial.  Most of them, in fact, are safely self deprecating.  Yet invariably, someone will take the particular joke seriously in the comments section and try to argue with me.  “What matters is not why said chicken crossed the road, good Sir, but if it was humanely butchered.  Your callous disregard for the chicken’s welfare speaks of….”

So it’s a Catch 22.  (Or a Kobayashi Maru, depending how literary/nerdy you lean.) Either I write a blog that no one reads, or I deal with comments that make me want to open a vein (in myself or in someone a bit more veiny).   But I think I’ve figured out a viable third option.  I’m hiring a staff of twenty to read and pre-screen all the comments, shielding me from any undo pain and suffering.  (And by “staff of twenty” I mean my cat).

So here we go.  My first blog on my blogger page’s blog, all about blogging. Was it bloggy enough? 

In the end, all I can really hope for is that when I blog someone, they stay blogged.