eTHE BEGINNING OF THE END CONTINUES

I DON'T KNOW IF THE FCT THAT I AM EDITING OUT OF ORDER MAKES THE EXERCISE UESELESS OF MORE INTERESTING BUT I DO NO HAVE THE TECHNICAL FACILITY TO MODIFY WHAT I AM DOING SO GOOD MORNING , AMERICA. I unblogged yesterday the beginning of the end.WHAT ON EARTH DOEST THAT MEAN? Did I finally run out of nothing to say or grow discouraged at the thought that it was unlikely that more than a few people would ever read my nothings? All these things are true, but no truer than I anticipated when I started.THIS IS KNOWN AS RETARDED PRESCIENCE I have thought there might be some questions you might want to ask me: 1) Why are you doing this. A. I had no idea what blogging was like. It seemed worth giving it a shot, as if it were a new kind of verbal rollerblading. 2) Couldn't you determine, say, in ten or less posts that this was going to go nowhere? A. Precisely the purpose, right on target, except there is no target other than to keep the words flowing and reasonably interesting.THIS DOES NOT ANSWER THE QUESTION AND THE POSTS ARE NOT REASONABLY INTERESTING. MOST OF THEM SUCK 3) Are they interesting? A.I don't know. I haven'T read most of them. As I go back and edit I find some more interesting than others but I haven't read enough to give the whole enterprise a passing or failing grade.YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MANY MILLIONS OF PEOPLE ARE RELIEVED TO HEAR THIS 4) Have you reached the end of the line? A. Quite possibly, but I have beEn here before and the line does tend to twist and turn. There is a fat lady in the audience but she hasn't sung yet. 5) Will you stop at any particular point? A. I was thinking about death but assuming that is more than, say, a year off, it will probably be well before that.OH PLEASE LET IT BE SOONER. PLEASE DIE, PLEASE. Blogg will stop when it seems strained and boring to the author who is an expert in detecting these things. HE MAKES A MEAN CHOCOLATE MILSHAKE TOO. The jury is still out.WHEN DID YOU SAY IT WAS IN? 6) When you stop, will you regard the whole thing as having been a waste of time. A. What would I have been doing with this time? I might have been strangling small children. Enough of your stupid questions. Why don't we just let today be today and you can chew on your bloggy sustenance while I go back and trim the fat off what I have previously wrought. I DO THINK A PRO AND CON ARGUMENT ON THE MERITS OF STRANGLING SMALL CHILDREN IS IN ORDER FIRIST. If you are still reading, the one question author would ask with all these negatives floating around is why.BECAUSE WE WANT TO SEE IF THE TERM ASSHOLE IS FINITE. Ah, sweet mystery....

SKIP THIS ONE

Blogg is in a b.m. and there's no point subjecting anyone else to it. Explanations may or may not follow.

SHOOTING BLANKS

A morning so average in everyway, it's absolutely extraordinary. Early awakening, same cloud formations as we've had the last few days, various thoughts including some about blogg flitting in and out during medititation and now that we are actually in the ring a sense of abject terror that this will be the round that knocks blogg out. In effect it should be blogg's triumph- the power of nothing. But once you've said "the power of nothing,"what more can you say. Would you like to hear some specific things about nothing's power. It is unable to write anything except the sentence it is working on and that has to be without meaning. It creates an idiotic sense of tension in the writer that he has run out of things to say when he never had anything to say in the first place. It makes blogg feel that no matter how much it pushes, it is basically stuck in reverse but one fool is trying to push it up the mountain anywhere. And if the fool is strong enough to reach the top of the mountain, what will he do? He will get out of the car, stretch, yawn, then scream at the top of his lungs, "I'M ON TOP OF THE FUCKING MOUNTAIN." What will he do then, his purpose for existence achieved. He could (and this is just a hypothetical suggestion so don't run for the exits quite yet) somehow turn the car around, switch gears and drive down the mountain. And with each mile he would tell you more and more intimate things about himself and knowledgeable factors about the real world we inhabit until by the time we got to ground level, you would be a walking Wikopedia, just bursting at the seams with facts, as opposed to knowledge and wisdom. You would have achieved the knowledge in making the trip. You would have attained the wisdom in finishing it. Blogg has no idea if any of these attributes really exist and blogg currently has no plans to reveal the intimate details of his life to strangers because they could be embarrassing and would be boring. So like an endless root canal we just continue. Blogg ends when author ends blogg. Points may or not be made. This may take a little time or a long time. Facts about the author's life may or may not be revealed. What the author knows is that if blog has any conclusion that conclusion will not be revealed until the last word. It could be "bean" or "virus." I could fill pages of posts with potential last words then back my prose into them. And why would anyone undertake something so idiotic-- to make some fetid point about the meaninglessness of words, a point that could have been made much more easily by the author keeping his mouth shit and never starting blogg. Anyway, the view is nice up here.There's just about enough room to turn the car around. But there are also roads veering off in different direction. And blogg has no gps, so each road must be examined carefully and manually. This could take years.

BETWEEN THE LINES

What ever happened to the aphorisms that were supposed to start off each entry? They've been mostly replaced by title-lets, another step in the unvelopment of blogg as it becomes the thing it was always meant to become. Take the notion of excluding the external world. Author has never asked himself why-- to blog pure blog seems like a limp response. Because the author's external world is not as interesting as the lack of his external world? Possible. But any intelligent person ought to be able to read between the lines (I'm not sure I can) and glean as much personal information about author by what he leaves out, as opposed to what he includes. If author were King of Siam, and Olympic Gold Cup winner and an Oscar winner for Best Actor, it is unlikely he would choose this fetid format. He would choose something cooly casual where he could boast and leave the reader thinking, "What a genius and what a nice guy." So we now have five facts and aspects of personality that we can eliminate from the competition 9king of Siam, Gold Cup Winner, Best Actor, genius and nice guy.) A truly thorough reading (of which I am not asking anyone, myself includded)would probably result in the elimination of hundreds, if not thousands of the author's personality traits, leaving behind the dregs which form the author's life in the so-called real world. This seems appropriate for a blog, as opposed to a story in which the reader might end up actually experiencing a facsimile, or a part of a facsimile of the author's corporeal existence. The reason for doing it this way, as opposed to the unending joy of clickety clack remains as specious as ever. But (and this is a personal thing) author feels he is revealing himself more and more by not revealing himself. It's a kind of reverse striptease, where you start nude and gradually adorn yourself. It is not very erotic, or in this case, esthetic. But it is something. On page whatever this is, we have the detection of motion of a sort which might even go somewhere, which is what blogg was hoping for when it was just a little clack. In that case, the entire foregoing entries are a kind of foreplay to get me to the point where less is truly more and reader is revealed my most intimate secrets-- something well worth waiting for and tellable in no other way since author himself is unaware of what they are until he reads them along with you. We shall see. I hope violence rears its ugly but interesting head somewhere along the way. But not religion.

DOTS

BLOGG actually remembered some of wnat he wrote yesterday, probably because part of it was an edit of something he had written previously. It was about dots and about how if you stared at them and they and you did nothing else, they could still be interesting by virtue of their dotness and their relationship with you-- where did that meaning come from and what did it mean? All this by way of another thrust up Mt. Blogg, home of Meaningless Volcano. I see that I was considering abandoning Blogg not because it was saying the same thing again and again but because the message, at least on the surface seemed utterly without value and meaning. Who am I to judge what is valuable and meaningful. Blogg is my dot. You look at it and you create whatever value and meaning you wish, or you abandon it if it is not creating enough for you. The dot is a mirrored dot reflecting back images of you looking at BLOGG. What meaning does that image hold for you? It means shit to me, but then again, I'm not you. I won't know what it means to me fully until I finish, if I ever do, but it just occured to me that a rule implicit in this enterprise is that it never be finished but be in a perpetual state of almost finishment-- a serious state where the frustrations of the author are so real that termination seems utterly possible,. Author can't say he will never finish. Never is a long, long time. But he can say he will never stop because of the meaninglessness of the project. If anything that will spur him on to new depths. Blogg will continue to icily reflect on itself seeking to find out if there is anything knowable from an idiotic premise.There is painfully little information to have and with ipads and kindles there is entirely too much mindless information crashing into the shore already.Blogg waves are like those of a crystalline wave.You can look back fifty feet and see the same kind of wave containing the same level of silt coming at you as you did with the one before and the one before that. It will splash in sightly above your ankle so your shorts are safe. It is a sunny day. But we must hope the sun does not get so strong that it takes us away from BLOGG and places us indoors where sanity and conventionality rule. I have not yet thought if fish work in this analogy.

DOES THE END EVER END?

Some sort of assessment is in order. Blogg started out (a few names ago) as an experient of the author's to discover what "blogginess" felt like. Felt like to write and offered it as a potential reading experience to whoever might stumble upon it. The standard used was that as long as the author felt interested enough to keep writing it, there must be something in it worth reading,if only by the author, to praise his own writing ability. The rule about not having the author's personal life intrude seemed essential at the beginning in order to distill the essence of pure blog and not degenerate into autobiography, memoir or limerick. What is becoming apparent is that if you remove biographical incident from the author's life, fiction and what have you, what you are left with is post after post about how the posts are meaningless but the author intends to keep posting them because the meaningless is the meaning. It's German philosophy lite. The author's barometer has always been his low threshold for boredom. The moment he gets bored, there is something radically wrong with the narrative that must be righted or he will stop the narrative. The author finds boring writing a great personal embarrassment, whereas stupid, meaningless writing can have their place, can be amusing and, taking a step back, even serfious in a manner of speaking. The author wanted to experience the writing of a blog and share it. He did not want to share the content. He just wanted to share the experience. Somewhere in his mottled brain he assumed it would go somewhere interesting for him and for the reader. But this does not seem to have been the case. It's endless repetetion in sightly different forms of the initial idea. The point, if there was one to prove, has been proven. This sucks. If the author wasnts to write, limericks about vegetables, which he actually wrote (oops, broke the fucking meaningless rule) a few decades ago would be preferable to this.
I could end the agony now and just say, "this is it." End of blogg. We are fast approaching that moment. But while the author has been disappointed in the result of his experience, he has enjoyed the experience itself of clickety clacking about anything for fifteen minutes after his coffee and morning meditation. He hates the thought of giving this up and wonders if there is a variation in the blog format that he could find which would keep him clacking and smiling but would not be so offensively stupid that it would be embarrassing. We are out on a thin limb that overlooks a deep cliff, so we shouldn't expect too much. But sometimes desperation is a good instructor. One of the author's meditation books said that every time the meditator came off his breath and back to the mind, it should not be looked on as a failure but an opportunity to improve one's meditation. So blogg again asks to be cut some slack even if it is terminal. I clack therefore I am.

DISCOURAGEMENT IS WHEN THERE IS SOMETHING IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

I think we are starting to hit the dregs of the dregs. In a desperate, but misguided attempt to find something new, I decided to go back and edit an old post before writing this one, the idea being that there would be something wonderful or terrible I could pick up on rather than "This doesn't mean anything." I am now doubly discouraged. All the posts are stupid but the one I landed on seemed to be in the back row or out of the classroom. Something about a dog and flowers which give wasting space a bad name and now puts me out in front of the crowd with nothing new to say but also without the hope that when I go back to edit, I will find some hidden treasure. This reminds me of a man with some sort of terminal disease trying, unsuccessfully, to find a comfortable position. But no matter how he contorts himself, it still hurts, though differently. But perhaps I am learning something. I am learning the difference between blogging and writing because there is no way I would allow anyone to see something as nauseatingly would-be witty as I just witnessed. It would have been edited out invisibly (as opposed to capital letter underscored) before anyone, hopefully even I, could read it. Writing is work. Writing about nothing ought still to be work. My only hope is that as I go forward, if I go forward, as I go backward I will bring to bear my meager writing talents on old blogs and something will come of it. The post you are currently reading sucks as much as most do, but at least it offers an idea, some hope. Something. Perhaps that should be my goal as I move forward. Offer something. If you can. I know lots of things, most not very interesting, but things never the less. I must try to subtly work them into the threads without revealing their context. And why do I do this? Because I am mad, as any idiot can see.

STEW

I believe I've mentioned before that I as I mindlessly trudge forward with Blogg, I have also been going backward reading older posts and, when possible, attempting to edit them into making some sort of sense, eliminating repetitions (which means eliminating 90 per cent of blogg). The sense that if I did this long enough I would reach a place where dross would turn to gold and a masterpiece emerge (even though only four people would see it) has left for the time being. Clickety clak and the awesome power of mindless routine have taken over as primary motives for continuation now, especially after going back and reading some of the earlier entries, which, alas, are not that different from the later entries except in their anticipation that the later entries might be better than they are. I spoke yesterday or the day before or whenever about a fadeout ending for blogg. Or I can probably and it endlessly, then go back and edit all the endings, then edit the edits of the endings. It all boils down to pablum. I was so discouraged that I was considering moving forward only by moving backwards, that is, assuming blogg was over, and catching up on the month or two of unedited blogs that I would put forward as new ones. It may come to that, but not yet, as can be deduced that this convoluted explanation has already taken up the better part of a post. I am in water over my head. I am tired of swimming. But I am still out here and currents change. I have neither the patience nor the space to do anything dramatically new now, except perhaps silently ponder my options for the next 24 hours, so I will go back and edit an old blog and see if that inspires me and you can dust or fry eggs---I can't imagine that my most rabid, I mean avid, fans will be interested in this internal process. But on the off chance one is, the edits are in capital letters. Don't ask me if they are real edits or an attempt to turn this into some sort of palimpsest (that's the first time I've ever used that word. I hope I used it correctly and spelled it right). Use a static free cloth for your computer and don't get it wet.

WHY?

If I had any sense of pride or regard for the three or four stragglers (strangers?) who might actually be reading this thing (count me out), I would probably skip today's post much the way you call in sick when you have the flu. Blogging is about the furthest thing from my consciousness now, not because of blogging primarily but because the author is feeling depressed. This leads him to a dilemma. Does he not blog because he is feeling depressed or is that untrue to the premise of the blog which is to spray whatever comes to mouth. It also sidesteps dangerously close to real life, which must be avoided at all costs, if anything is true about this enterprise. Why is the author depressed? Does it haved anything to do with the fact that he sees this exercise going interminally nowhere. Furthermore he had a thought during his meditation about how it will end. Even WAR AND PEACE ended. Did Tolstoy know how it would end when he began it. The only ending author can think of for BLOGG is musical-- a fadeout ending in which the type gradually gets lighter and lighter, blending in more and more with the gray/white of the screen until nothing more is visible. Blogs have not been around long enough to have a formalized form (last two lines must rhyme), so you can basically do whatever the fuck you want except write it after you are dead or have lost interest. The fadeout leads to some technological problems, but I'm sure an email to Steve Jobs would fix that quickly. The point(lessness)is that you are always unlikely to receive anything of significance from these posts, the nothing you usually receive is likely to seem like something because the author, for reasons to be discussed with his shrink (did I reveal too much again?) doesn't particularly give a shit one way or the other today. If this were a normal piece of prose, the author would probably skip a day or if he did write, just edit this section out (which, if I have any sense, when I come to edit this section, I will do). I feel like singing a song or reciting a poem. Either would qualify as adding nothing to the content of blogg, but would be more pleasant for the reader than this nauseating circular nothing. How about you fill in the song or the poem-- one of your favorites. Make it happy. Cheer the author up. Mother always used to say, "There's always tomorrow."

BLANK

Blogg (going forward name for work and worker) meditates, which is more than you should know or he (also more) should tell you. Blogg is a kind of meditation as well. Physically it brings to the author's mind, when it is going well (I will put a W in the margin so you can tell) a sense of peace and accomplishment which makes about as much sense as it does in real meditation. But one doesn't meditate to attain a sense of peace and accomplishment, at least not if one does it according to reputable books that try to explain the unexplainable. One meditates to....One doesn't meditate to.....It is absolutely useless and therein lies its use and uniqueness. How many things can you think of that are absolutely useless no matter which way you hold them or what you do with them. Author would hope that blogg is one of them, although explanation of feelings about writing a blog of no use could be construed as a use, especially if one were writing a how-to book on the subject. Oxymoronic Title?: How To Do Nothing. Again, if we peel further, the book is not truly oxymoronic since one can hold it in contrast to How To Do Something and talk about all the peaceful virtues that ensue when one does nothing, assuming that the reader will accept the present blogg as doing nothing, though it is a little in-joke. Doing nothing would be a blank blog read by no one. No one would have written it and no one would know it was there, wherever that is. No pixels would have been disturbed from more important chores. The proverbial tree has fallen in the proverbial empty forest. We may have to settle for calling blog a simulation of doing nothing, otherwise we would not know it existed and I would still be meditating. I like the subtitle, "A Simulation," when placed next to blogg. It is real and sureal at the same time. It leads the reader to unexpect the expected and expect the unexpected. Though the point of blogg is to be utterly devoid of content, which so far the author has managed to achieve for a paragraph or two before something sneaks in, there is a blibk twixt reader and writer. First off writer has noticed he gets fucking bored when he lives up to his own notions of artistic purity, which means they may have to subtly be rethought and pushed one cenimeter more autobiographically. "Nothin ain't worth nothin if its real." Isn't that a line from "Me and Bobbty McGee. "Holding the reader's and he writer's interest with as little external subject intrusion as possible" might be another subtitle though it does not slide trippingly off the tongue. And the lack of external intrusion may be the most interesting thing in the world to some of you out there. It goes back to clackety clack, another title. It goes back to the fact that the writer is as probably more perplexed than the reader by what he is doing. The reader is more likely to predict the next sentence than the reader unless it is "Eggplant!"

THE DEATH OF BLOGG

I forgott (stet) whether blogg has two g's or three. Let's leave it as two in the text. We can always call in a repair person later. Do blogs die? Never having written a blog or read one from beginning to end (if there is an end) I thought it a question worth asking. Maybe die is not exactly the right word. Maybe it's end. They accomplish their goal and they end. If that's the case, BLOGG will never die since its end is nothin and nothing is one of those things like minus zero that equals infinity. So I can go on dishing this shit forever. Until I die. Which brings me back to the original question. If I were to get fatally hit by a truck today, blogg would be an unfinished work of (be real now)prose. Its elecrons would go drifiting off like the memories of dead people and in a relatively short period of time it would effectively cease to exist. But if I found that I had a slow spreading terminal condition and could pretty much count on dying with three to six months, what would I do. Would I try to find a conclusion with which to end blogg if such a thing is possible (other than "the end.") Or would I immediately switch go another blogg about my imminent demise- hopefully something more serious than the hiink we have been playing with here. A testimony for my kids, parents, relatives. But know what? The electrons still go wafting off into space, maybe a week or two later. Old blogs are like stale bread. The blog medium probably won't even exist in six months, having been transmogrified into something that zaps from the clouds onto your ipad with commercials. There will be a blog bestseller list (there probably is already) even though you are not selling anything. The point this is arching toward is that I am not in any imminent peril but I am not young enough to fuck around completely with what time I may have left, so blogg should have its serious aspects--- not just a man juggling flaming orange juice cartons on a goat, though that would make a nice cover if this ever became a book. So I pledge (and this may be hard for both of us to believe) that this will be the best I am capable of doing while I am alive. I doubt (unless my theology is way off) that I will be able to do much better when I am dead. I will try to write each blog as if it were my last or at least have each blog end in such a way that I would not be completely embarrassed. This will be difficult to do because l) it is difficult to do and 2) I will probably have forgotten all this by tomorrow's entry. So let's end today with a bow to mortality, which proves something important that we haven't discovered yet, as opposed to the ending of blogs which proves as much as their beginnings-- nothing.

OH DREAD

Good morning, class. Has everyone removed and hung up their jackets, pencils sharpened, bathroom trips taken. Before I smother you with the news that my mind is a total blank (as it should be, I think), I want to tell you that I am considering changing the name of BLOGG TO BLOGGG. That may be the last significant piece of information you receive on this post. The reason is simple and idiotic. I want my slice of uniqueness. I intuit that many fools who are writing sort of blog (I do not flatter myself with its originality) may be calling it BLOGG but fewer would be perverse enough to call it BLOGGG or even BLOGGGG, though that may be getting excessive. If we were entering all these names on one of those things that say "medium security strength," do we think that BLOGGGG would be significantly safer than BLOGG? Safer than what? It's not like someone is going to steal my fucking Visa card off this. This tangential beginning to the post (and here I must return to the blankness of mind I alluded to)is probably a lame attempt to clickety clack until something, anything comes along that I can attach to the mainland and doesn't look too strained. It could be something like the fact that there are times when I have nothing to say and I get really depressed about it and there are other times when I have nothing to say and I either couldn't care less (I can always edit it out) or feel that those moments are truer to the spirit of BLOGGG than the happier ones. For there is, after all, no hiding the fact that the premise was made clear in sentence one and the further we get from it the further we get from out goal, which is to.....to do exactly as I am doing now. I do feel an obligation (long childhood explanation, much too personal) to be as amusing as I possibly can be, hopefully intentionally but I'm not too proud to take the other kind as well and sometimes get sort of confused where my amusement is coming from. I was talkng about my efforts to be amusing while I wasted our time and the reasons, deep in my childhood for doing it. There are no reasons deep in my childhood any more than my nose is a reason deep in my childhood. Bloggg goes from fingertips to keyboard with no intermediaries like brain or heart so I am attempting to be amusing because I am attempting to be amusing. Actually, thinking about it now, if I were deliberately attempting NOT to be amusing, the result would probably be a lot funnier-- or just more boring. I'm not sure which, but I may give it a whirl at some desperate moment in the future. I could end this post with a summary if I had the vaguest idea of what it was trying to say. But I will say,as I have said before (and my track record is pretty good, if I say so myself) that better times are coming. Truly amusing times. Hilarious times. Profound times. And perhaps, if there are more nuts out there than I realized, more ggg's.

BLOGGING, MEDITATION, EXERCISE, RELIGION

Ambitious title. We really must be getting into the heart of it now. To attempt to take them a piece at a time (actually the long title is to help me remember them at all) and full disclosure-- this brilliant revelation did come to me during meditation. Which brings us to blogging and meditation, which as I was focusing on my breath I realized are very much the same thing-- at least the way I do it. The subject matter, nothing, provides us with a base, like breathing, around which we can display our thoughts about, well....nothing. In meditation, when it works, this paradoxically gives us a kind of freedom to think about all the idiotic things we would normally think about, especially if we were writing or in the company of people. Here, not only does it all hang out, it's been hanging since post one and it is the hanger. Merit, normally a consideration in these things, has fallen by the wayside long ago. What keeps us going? I think it's one of those long esoteric acids that you find in vitamins that scientists say do nothing for you but the folkore is so stron, the price so high and the labels so cool, we take it anyway.

Blogging is like meditation in that both of them have you focused on one thing (In meditation breathing; in bloging typing) so that the idiotic things you normally censor yourself about for thinking spring free for the world to laugh at. I probably don't meditate correctly (I don't do many things correctly) so the "high" I'm getting from it is pretty low, probably about the same level as this. If I ever finish blogg, I may take up meditation more seriously. Somthing has been such a disaster in my life it's time to give nothing a serious shot.

Exercise is simply the joy I get from the clackety clack of the keys.My fingers move much faster writing blog than they do anything else since there is no untoward interference by the brain to slow things up. And clackety clack feels like accomplishment regardless of how idiotic your clacks are.,

As far as religion goes- I hesitate to get into this one but that won't stop me. BLOGG may or may not be a sort of scripture. I wouldn't know because I haven't read it. But there is a singlemindedness and peacefulness to putting it together that feels sort of religious. There's also the feeling that there is probably about as much fact=based reality in BLOGG as there is in most religions, or at least the really dumb ones, the kind that think the universe is walking on a frog's back.

Having dispensed with these heady issues I am overcome by the question, "What the fuck difference does it make--" a question that can be asked of virtually every sentence in blogg. I am actually going to attempt to answer it, though the answer will accrue you no positive good unless you are me. Today's post feels to me like an eight course dinner, as opposed to the usual ones that feel like a couple of peas and a fig. It seems to be about something, even if it is contributing nothing to the body of knowledge about the things that it is allegedly about. It has made me happy. Which is way more personal than I ought to be getting. But it has made me optimistic that the show can go on for a while and the optimistic entries are usually more fun to write than the depressive ones, which come so much more easily and frequently. So wallow in this post. Enjoy it. Love it. It is probably as good as it is going to get for both of us. Think about all it has taught you about so many things ranging from typing to figs to OM. When you put all these things together and a small smile starts to form on your lips, you are in really deep shit-- just like me.

SCHOOL DAYS

Welcome back, children. Isn't it lovely to be here in our quiet room with all the franticness of modern life outside where it can't harm us. Where the only thing we have to think about is how we will pass this time together. Isn't it relaxing? Doesn't it feel as if you've been given a reprieve from something (you have-meaning). Now that we are all gathered in a circle, let's hold hands and share our thoughts. Sharon, would you like to go first this week. You can skip the introductory information. It doesn't matter where you're from or what your do. We just want your reaction to the space. "I find it thrilling." "Not the word I would have expected," Sharon. "Interesting, perhaps, obnoxious, but why thrilling. What about blogg thrills you?" "There is so much expected of us in modern life. We almost have to learn new things every day whether we want to or not just to keep up with our peers. It is so refreshing to be in a place where nothing is expected except to be yourself." "Well, that's interesting even if it's not exactly true, Sharon, because things ARE (capital letters will have to sub for italics until I figure out how to access them) expected of you here. You are expected to be on time for your post, although you schedule them. You are expected to play by the rules, injecting as much as you can that pertains to blogging while maintaining your physical anonymity. You are expected to have faith in the ultimate merit of the project even when, especially when your friends are laughing you silly because although you are not blogg you are part of it. You are giving it part of your non-existence, the amount is up to you. Giving of one's non-existence is harder than it seems, perhaps even harder than giving of one's existence. It requires tortured postures and unshakable faith. But that's why we're all in this classroom together- to practice these exercises to the point where we can give with ease to the point where we are not only giving to blogg, we are blogg. Blogg is inside us. Even if we don't know exactly what he is, trash heap or god, we believe in him, we will protect and defend him according to the ten rules of blogginess: 1) Thou shalt place no other blogg before me 2) Ignorance is no excuse 3) Cherry is the best flavor 4) No one really knows what a blogg is. 5) The more hits, the more hurts because you are being taken away from the essential loneliness of the enterprise 6)The real reason to blog is because it feels good to the fingertips and when you get a head of steam up it seems as if you must be accomplishing something. 7) Sheer perversion 8)It is a mini-sabbath where all other things must be put away 9)The challenge: can you do this?
10) The answer: What is the this that you are trying to do? We will now slowly put our pencils and crayons back into their shoeboxes and vow to meet at this spot the next time. I believe Scott decides when we meet next. Is that right, Scott? Are you already busy thinking of interesting things for us to talk about?

e footnotes

e You may have noticed the startlin absence of italics and boldface. I think I just found the control so there may be much excitement in the offing. Hold on to your hats.

ePEOPLE

IN AN AREA WHERE EVERYTHING SEEMS TO HAVE BEN EDITED THIS POST STANDS VIRGINAL. I DO NOT QUESTION WHY NOR SHOULD YOU. No new revelations in the hour before setting fingers to keypad. We is wingin' it, children.Let's see if we can stay off-topic without planning. Actually, there was one subject that I thought about briefly yesterday and for just a smidgeon today and that was the question of audience. I was bemoaning the fact that only three or four people seemed to be consistently following this masterpiece, one of them quite possibly me. My friend gave me all kinds of tips how by doing certain things, joining this, responding to that, I could probably increase my readership considerably. I thought about this for a while and re-translated it into his saying that the blog is a social form of writing and therefore one had to play the game socially. This as opposed to normal writing where you can mark your genius in a notebook, put it in a closet and forget about it except on Christmas eve when you can show it to a drunk Aunt Millie after the duck. Computers, at least at present, are too expensive to store in closets, for while you blog you can do other things with them like reading and writing email, printing out wedding invitations and whatever else your ingenuity can come up with LIKE PELING COCONUTS. So the blog stays on the desk and, at least at present, blogg remains with its limited readership. With great effort I could probably do some of the things that my friend suggested, which boil down to a sort of electronic, "You show me yours, I'll show you mine." But being as illiterate as I am, I feel guilty spending time reading the good or bad work of others simply to get them to read mine. I am nearly Faulkner-illiterate. How can I be illiterate in Faulkner but an expert in Stacy from Kansas City? There is no free lunch. This should have been apparent to me when I began, but it wasn't and if it was, I might never have begun.AND THE WORLD WOULD BE A VERY DIFERENT PLACE. So I have accepted the fact that barring unforseen miracles,blogg is likely to maintain its minute readership. The good thing about this is that when you are not writing for an audience but simply writing for yourself and the subject, you are less likely to slip into entertainment ASSUMING YOU ARE CAPABLE OF IT. Author can do this reasonably well USING A SCALE THAT MEASURES THE SILIA OF AMOEBAS but has done this reasonably well. Author has never blogged, has no idea what the limitations of the medium are, ultimately what gets them read. So author will just continue writing away and let the audience end take care of itself until at some point technology surpasses our expectations, which could happen at any time.AND THEN THE WHLE WORLD READS THIS AND PROCLAIMS YOU KING. The fact that there is not a large audience reading our anti-blog does not feel wrong. This is a modest venture which should be written humbly and read sporadically. So let's just say we are on track, even though we still have no idea where that track is heading. Perhaps thataway.THE REPETITION OF UNORIGINAL THOUGHT IS TRULY STAGERING.

EA CHALLENGE

IF ANYNE CARES I BELIEVE THIS EDIT COMES WELL BEFORE THE ONE WRITTEN WELL AFTER. I've had an uncharacteristically blank meditation session today as far as blogg is concerned, with nary a thought of it. This should matter,according to my own rules of engagement, not a whit. In fact, I could argue, it will make blogg all that purer and more sponaneous, to have its words spring forth unpreviewed from my brain-- isn't that the point of the whole thing? HOW NOVEL. I am going to try to teach myself to chip away in little pieces.DISHES? In previous posts, in a situation like this I would probably be moaning and groaning about the meaninglessness of it all and what do I think I'm doing and shit like that. I'm going to do do that, since I can't think of anything else unpremeditated, but I'm going to try to do it in a more finite and cheerful manner. When I screamed before about how difficult doing this continually was and the pain of having no readers, it was with the emotional fervor of having a bomb dropped on, say, Rockefeller Center. Today, I say, I am feeling somewhat mindless about the enterprise, which is not surprising since the enterprise encourages mindlessness, infinite mindless.I'LL BET IF YOU TRIED REAL HARD YOU COULD FIGURE OUT A WAY TO GET A FOURTH MINDLESS INTO THAT SENTENCE. Yes, I am just whistling one of those happy meaningless tunes until something, anything comes into my head that will keep this charade going a few pages longer. Oh yes, I just thought of something. Blogg, one would think, would have a bumpety bump sort of narrative arc, if any, as it will have no beginning, modern and end or any postmodern variation thereof. But it occurred to me that when I went back and did my edits it might be possible to repurpose this (I love that word) into a veritable narrative. The odds of my deciding to and being able to do this are, admittedly, infintessimal and would probably destroy whatever integrity blogg has, which is all it has.IT HAS NONE. But one should never say never. When I go back and edit (and I do this every day, you remember), I am often surprised by what I find. Make that I am always surprised by what I find because this stream of words ushers forth so spontaneously I remember virtually nothing so everything I encounter on second glance is a surprise and is either better or worse than I would have thought. Take today. This seems to me a perfectly pleasant, calm and idiotic post. In a couple of months I will edit it. What will I make of it. Will it have a pivotal place in a repurposed blogg?(oh, leave me be)or will it just be the usual flotsam.THE ANSWER IS B. Few would lose money betting on the latter. I will leave it at that save mentioning that the energy level in this calm post is rather pathetic, lame even for me, and that if I want to keep this thing going at all I have to learn to say nothing with more energy: NOTHINK,something like that. Back to the past now. Have a nice day. Pray for me.NOTHINK? NOTHINK???!!!

ebach in the background

One of the nicest things about writing a blog is that three seconds before you are about to start you don't have a clue as to what you are going to say, then the fingers touch the keys and words pour forth. If you think about it too much before hand then it is going to lose the spontanaeity that makes a blog a blog a blog, not that I really know what it is. If you don't think about it at all, it could end up something like this. Actually, during my morning meditation which I undertake before writing (I don't think that's a state secret, I think I've mentioned it before. If I havent, big fucking deal). Occasionally during the meditation as thoughts flit into my mind and I dispense them by internally saying, "thought," some of them are things I could write in my about-to-be-written in blog. It's only natural to think about something you're going to do in a matter of minutes. But fortunately I have so many dopey thoughts that have nothing to do with the blog that I end up having to "thought" away that I invariably forget the thought I thought would be good for the blog, which keeps things pure. I am not sure,for the sake of future biographers, whether the following thought took place during the meditation or right after, as I turned on my computer and arranged my toys for writing. The thought was this: depending on whether you are reading this thing sporadically, backwards, from the first one forward (author's preference), you may have noticed that I mentioned somewhere that each time I do a new post, I go back and edit an old one. You can tell which are which by the little e in the title. And the major edits are in capital letters. I am doing this for a number of reasons and I may be able to enumerate one or two: 1)so you can see that when I am being really stupid, I am aware of how really stupid I am being and will show you so by writing something like IT TAKES A SPACE SCIENTIST TO FIGURE THAT OUT after the offending sentence. The second one, which I am not sure of, well, I have to backtrack a second, I have never read blogg in consecutive order and have no idea whether the experience would be blissful or an ideal. What is the narrative arc of a blog, or at least blogg? So going back and editing gives me a lay of the land, like where I'm coming from so I can tell, if I were the kind of writer who could control these kinds of things, whether blogg has a real plot (not that the author can he finish this thing) or not.Perhaps it is a paean to man's loneliness or something but the only way I will be able to tell is by reading it, just like you, but unless you are me or a complete fanatic you will only have to read this once and your value judgements will probably run in other directions (LET ME OUT OF HERE!). I mention this, which is turning out to be much more complicated than I thought it would be, because I am about a month behind myself in the editing and will be as long as I edit a blogg each time I write one, so the only time I will truly get the lay of the land is to write nothing new and just edit a month, which any fool can tell you will just mean laying the new stuff inbetween the lines of the old, so I'm just mixing things up. The only time I'm not writing is when they take this computer from these cold dead hands. You may be thinking, as I am about whether the relevance of this issue requires taking up so much space,which, of course, one may say about the whole enterprise. But why bother? Neither of us will stop me and I assume neither of us wish me ill health. Is everybody clear about everything? Shit, I forgot about Bach, but this is getting too long and I will do my derndest to tell you how he figures into all of this tomorrow. A damain.SINCE I DON'T KNOW WHAT ORDER I AM EDITING IN I DON'T KNOW WHETHER TO APOLOGIZE FOR SAYING THE SAME STUPID THINGS ABOUT EDITING 100 TIMES.BEFORE YOU GET PISSED OFF, REMEMBER THAT I AM REALLY DOING THE BEST I CAN, AS PATHETIC AS THAT MIGH BE. SHOW A LITTLE MERCY, DUDE,

eElectrons

I THINK I HAVE FOUND AN UNEDITED SECTION. The ephemerality of blogs was one of its greatest appeals to me. Boom from the brain; boom onto the computer; boom it's gone. But what ultimately happens to it. Nobody I know (and this certainly may be simply a limitation of the circle of my friends)WHICH IS COMPOSED OF EVERY IMPORTANT PERSON ON EARTH knows exactly what the internet is and what keeps it up there and why we are all not constantly baraged by shards of letters that say things like "cannot tolerate" and "fucking husband." Will there eventually be a galactic internet sweeper, a huge version of a vacuum cleaner that gets rid of all the old shit and makes it possible for things like blogg to exist? FUCKING HUSBAND WOULD BE AN IMPROVEMENT ON MOST OF THE STUFF YOU HAVE WRITTEN. Or will blogg exist forever in electron heaven. Would I have written blogg if I knew it would have existed long after its perpetrator's demise.ST. FRANCIS SAID THIS IN SLIGHTLY DIFERENT TERMS. Would I have thought more about leaving such a peculiar monument to my time on earth. What will future generations think? What will future generations think about all this anyway? Will they think about it at all.WHAT DOES IT REFER TO AND WHERE DID I PUT THE TUNA FISH. When's the last time you tought about the nature of the novel or why cans of tomato sauce are the shape they are? You will notice there is nothing in the post until now about the stupidity of it. EXCEPT FOR HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF ENTRIES. No, I am coming around to realizing that blogg raises important, nay, urgent questions, that everyone is much to busy to contend with. It doesn't answer any of them but didn't Decartes or Tina Fey say that a question is the beginning of an answer? NO, IT WAS TINA BROWN AND HUMPHREY BOGART. So it behooves us all, writer and reader. to pay attention, generally and specifically.HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A SENTENCE SO IDIOTIC? The laser shown on blogs WHAT? may end up preventing global warming. Shit, doesn't something have to? SUPERMAN!. I don't want naked eskimos reading this. What on earth will they think? TASTY BLUBBER.

THE MORTAL FLESH

An illness of the mortal flesh prevented me from posting yesterday. I tried but my incoherency was such that even I couldn't understand it. I hated the idea of losing a day, as if it would keep me from some goal. But then I realized what I really hated was the idea of losing the relationship with blogg for a day. One might say we were dating. Personification has taken place. I suppose it's the same thing with "Dear Diary," but diaries don't usually go on forever and one does not picture onseself a few years hence saying "Stacy, what ever happened to her." Aside from the fact that I do not know anyone named Stacy, I cannot imagine turning on my computer, feeling sentimental and going for some of the best of blogg. But I am back at my post today, filling in an absence, as it were, trying to get back into the rhythm of it. The logical thing to do would be to go back and read the last post, then decide whether I wanted to be continuous or discontinuous, since they seem to occur in nearly even proportions. But why do the logical thing? There is a piece of thread here that is either connected to blogg or a cat and I shall follow it long enough to give me a direction but not long enough to get scratched. I am glad I am not ill any longer because as I recall, I was in a "Rah Rah Blogg" phase last time and I would like to stay with it as long as possible. That was proceded, if I recall correctly, by an endless string of "What is the point of this?" type shit, which I hate but is sort of like tuning up. I am still not 100 per cent well so this post will end here while I heal. Two days would have been intolerable.

EPHASE 2

Tired. Major changes taking place in the writer's life hard not to include. Need to keep reminding myself they are not relevant to the work at hand. Feeling better after what seemed to me a sort of rededication yesterday.NOT SURE THAT YESTERDAY HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH TODAY'S ENTRY. WILL CHECK. I no doubt still will spend much time and many lines doubting the validity of what I am doing but I am hopeful that I will just regard those lines as additional text and keep at my job. ADDITIONAL TEXT? THE WHOLE BLOODY THING IS ADDITIONAL TEXT It's a bit like meditation where a thought interferes with your breath and you go, "oh, a tought." Ending blogg will take that posiion. Talking about ending blogg, however, is fair game as long as I can keep it interesting and the sentiment is sincere.AND TEDDYBEARS KISS STUFED FROGS. I was thinking two thoughts earlier: 1) Blogg is unlikely ever to see paper and 2) Blogg is unlikely to ever see financial remuneration. Were Blogg a conventional piece of prose these could both be seen as negative. In this world,AS OPPOSED TO THE ONE THE AUTHOR INHABITS however they are neutral, or even positive. The paperlessness, the brain to electron connection embellishes what style there is and probably speeds up the process of writing which makes the text take less time to make it from brain and heart to screen.YOU HAVE SAID THIS 400 TIMES. Not necessarily good, but more eficient. The lack of remuneration simply takes us back to a time when people wrote because they had something to say and if people wanted to read it, fine and if they didn't, fine. Small magazines and blogs seem to be reviving that option.WOW, THIS GUY IS REALLY KNOWLEDGEABLE ABOUT THE HISTORY OF PUBLISHING It must be mitigated, however, by the impossibility for the average citizen to find anything and the general short attention span that accompanies perusal even when one finds something interesting.A MEANINGLESS SENTENCE THAT STANDS OUT IN A MEANINGLESS PARAGRAPH BY VIRTUE OF ITS MEANINGLESSNESS-- NOT AN EASY FEAT. Blogg solves the short attention span problem by focusing its attention relentlessly on one thing, the thing that it is. For better, for worse, blogg is blogg and will relentlessly and tirelessly keep explaining that to anyone who wanders on its turf.WARNING; VISITORS WILL BE SHOT IN THE BRAIN. The writer is feeling as if he has cut through the initial waves which threatened to drown him in doubt and is standing on his board now, surveying calm seas. THE WRITER IS HALLUCINATING. The issues in his personal life will pass. Fuck, everything will pass.HE'S A PHILOSOPHER TOO. For today calm and gentle are the words.
SHIT, I WAS HOPING THEY WOULD BE ELBOW AND TYRANASAURUS.

eDEATH OF THE BLOG

AT SOME POIN IN THE FUTURE YOU WILL COME TO A HARANGUE ABOUT MY NOT BEING ABLE TO ACCESS OLD BLOG ENTRIES AS EASILY AS I ONCE DID. I HAVE SOLVED THE PROBLE BY HITTING THE EDIT BLOG BUTTON TWICE SO ANTICIPATORILY DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT AND THIS PAGE, WHICH WOULD HAVE GONE UNEDITED WILL NOW BE REVISED TO A KEATSIAN SHEEN.
Don't get your hopes up. Not quite yet. One of the most difficult things about killing a project like this is that there is still an iota of the something that made you start it floating around in the big thing between your shoulders. Before you started that thing had already predicted that you would come to this point (i'm tired; it sucks) and wanted to see if you were man enough to go beyond that-- to go beyond where common sense and literature and sanity would take you and just keep pounding out the same point because....because BLOGG (and if anyone who knows anything about art is reading, I'm fucked) makes as much sense as a brick wall with graffiti standing in a large gallery. It is. That is its complete statement. We allow music and art and occasionally poetry to make that meaningless statement but we want our words to mean something because that's what words are for. After all, we use them every day and couldn't live without them very well. BECAUSE STARING AT A BRICK WALL WILL NOT MAKE YOU A CUP OF COFFEE. So why should we take these useful tidbits and waste them saying the same stupid thing over and over AND OVER again. Because it can be done? Because the only way you can get to the wordiness of words is by turning them against themselves. And because they are such powerful tools, bearing the relationship to prose that atoms do to the atom bomb,(WHA?) that the only way you can get people to even be aware of the fact that they are using these odd letter combinations thousands of times a day is to turn the little mothers against themselves and show just how useless they can be. And what is the point of that? The same as the brick wall in the museum.BY GOD HE'S CLEVER)( Even by Picasso's time art had shed its need for a point. Why should words be different. Especially now that we have this wonderful electronic medium that allows us to spin them out with unprecedented speed-- so fast, in fact that the writer barely knows what he is writing about, let alone the reader.(REPEAT NUMBER 612) The fact that there may be no readers or an infintessimal number of them in a medium that reaches billions every second makes the point even more strongly. (WHAT POINT?)That was the point that was bouncing around in my hollow brain when I began and before I typed word one I had to believe that I would never stop. To stop would mean defeat. It would also mean that I have wasted a lot of everyone's time. That's for others(IS THERE SOMEONE ELSE HERE/ COME OUT, COME OUT WHEREVER YOU ARE) to judge on their own, but to me BLOGG as useful as anything else that employs words.(EXCEPT FOR TELEVISION LISTINGS) The mere fact that on the day I decided I might kill this thing (today) a whole new thing(THE SPECIFICITY OF HIS STYLE IS ONE OF MY FAVORITE PARTS OF BLOGG) sprung up (the elusive rivulet) proves that it can and must go on forever. It is only when the meaning of BLOGG is universally acknowledged that I can consider terminating it. Blogg is alive and making his way through the literary and internet universe. Its stupidity is of an order that deserves awards.(GOLDEN GLOBES?) The stupider the words get the more the point is proven that words are...well, just words and perhaps we would do better developing a communication system that uses tangerines. We have scared the doubter off this time. It was never a serious contest. I have reams of electrons and the determination that only the borderline insane posses to prove something UTTERLY IDIOTIC(. Blogg lives! (OH, IF IT WERE ONLY AROUND DURING THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION THOMAS PAINE WOULD HAVE UNDERSTOOD, AND PERHAPS LED A MUCH MORE PAINELESS EXSITENCE) OUT OF HERE. THE LEVEL OF THE TAR PIT IS RISING OMINOUSLY.

eNEW POST

Never has anyone not wanted to write a post as much as I loathe the prospect of producing this one. Events in the author's personal life have conspired to make the author see how truly idiotic and meaningless BLOGG is but for reasons he cannot understand he insists on keeping the reasons private. There must be a Latin term to describe this but if it's in Latin I wouldn't understand it. While his life is on the line in other areas author wants you to know that he has decided that the joy of rhythmic typing is responsible for much of what he has written thus far. If this blogg had to be written in a notebook, it would be empty. Were our fingers evolutionarily designed for computer typing as our brain was for destroying the planet? For a mad moment I thought the riff about typing might develop into one of those rivulets I have been searching for to prolong the life of BLOGG although BLOGG's life does not deserve to be prolonged and only four people including myself and chelsea joe would know if it evaporated and since I am not even reading it, it really has only three followers. I am starting to hate BLOGG. Maybe that's the point. It shows you how despicable and lonely utter meaninglessness is and why our stories are populated with people having and solving problems. Final entry? No way. BLOGG will end on a positive note because this is America. Now to go swimming through eons of music looking for one. p.s. The tone, which seems at least to me to be nastier than it usually is, probably has more to do with the personal event I mentioned at the beginning rather than the blog istself. Those fucking personal events are really messing up our electronic literature and should be banned.THE PERSONAL EVENT THE AUTHOR REFERRED TO HAS LONG BEEN FORGOTTEN. IT IS NOT EVEN A CERTAINTY THAT THE AUTHOR HAS ANY PERSONAL EVENTS AT ALL HAPPENING TO HIM. BLOGG MAY BE HIS ENTIRE LIFE WHICH AT LEAST WOULD GIVE IT A PATHETIC PSYCHO-NEUROTIC REASON FOR EXISTENCE WHY DOES THE AUTHOR NOT CONSIDER BLOGG ITSELF A PERSONAL EVENT. IT IS AS PERSONAL AS EATING A RADISH SANDWICH. BECAUSE THE AUTHOR DOESN'T HAVE A CLUE AS TO WHAT HE IS TALKING ABOUT, THAT'S WHY. THE CURRENT SCREED MAY INSPIRE ME TO WRITE A NEW BLOGG THAT BASICALLY REPEATS THE SAME THING. I WILL TRY TO CALL IT HENRY SO YOU CAN AVOID IT. I WILL TRY TO CALL IT NOTHING SO I CAN AVOID IT. BUT I AM OBVIOUSLY OUT OF CONTROL SO HENRY MIGHT POP UP ANY TIME ANY PLACE. HAVE I CLARIFIED EVERYTHING? I DO HOPE THESE CRITIQUES ARE DOING THEIR JOB.

eTHE END

This may be the end of BLOGG or it may be the end of endings. Bear with me for a while while I decide. Logically speaking, there never was anything to say so I could just stop saying it at such great length. Logically speaking there is no need for the color blue either. The author is vested in BLOGG and feels it would be a failure to end it without an ending that made it make some sense. He just wrote a blog about writing a blog, decided it didn't work and ended it, would not work for this author, though it may come to that. I am hopeful that as I go back and edit I may discover rivulets which may take up the main subject and transfer it there. The odds for that are pretty slim. Every day, I suppose, just like universes, blogs are born and die. No big deal. If BLOGG dies, the author may turn his petty talent somewhere else. Right now he regards it as his attempt to understand the medium. But that is for him, not necessarily something to share with the public at large who either gets it or doesn't care. If I decide to quit you deserve a proper final entry. And I deserve something too. I need to think about what it is. I promise I won't write about it.ANYONE WHO HAS SCANNED AHEAD KNOWS THAT THIS IS NOT REALLY THE END. IT'S JUST THE AUTHOR'S RECOGNITION THAT THIS CAN'T GO ON FOREVER OR HE WILL BECOME A TURNIP.

e IS FOR EFFORT

Definitely a crisis in the making. Slamming into a closed door. The blog of blogs was supposed to open out into a vast prarie that told us things about ourselves, our art, our commerce, our desires. It seems instead to be be opening into its navel. If I were reading this as a reader, I would have skipped out weeks ago. Is the problem the subject or the execution. Or is there a problem? I detect problems two ways: 1) I get bored 2) I have nothing to say.I am still writing so I still have something to say. Am I bored? Not exactly. I am talking about being bored, which I guess one defines as writing about something that one is no longer interested in or the reader is no longer interested in.It feels like a chemistry lab where all the logical formulas have failed in developing the miracle drug so the chemist is randomly mixing things together hoping something will percolate. The fact that I have no additional followers should be cause for concern, but that could be cause for concern about my technical abilities as well, which I plan to fix regardless. As for the overarching comment, I refuse to comment about it until I reach the end. If we are approaching the end and blogg's format is this length, so be it. I will not keep it going just to keep it going. But I will not end it just to end it. I may play around with endinglets and see if any turn out to be small streams that lead to wide seas, or at least lakes. The oral comments I have gotten take this all rather seriously. My tone is serious. Do I take this seriously? I think if you have come this far and it looks like just a few more posts till the end, you should stick around. Something interesting may happen (like I may decide to change it into a history of possums) or not. I feel a sadness and a heaviness. Why? This is just a stupid blog. What I vested in it and why. This may take us out of the anonymity rule but rules are made to be broken. There may be some cool shards.

EHANG ON, SLOOPY

It was inevitable-- that this blog would start to grow tiresome. Originally I had envisioned doing it for the rest of my life, which I may have done (one never knows), but I am getting tired of saying the same stupid thing over and over and it becomes increasingly difficult to find interesting variations. Blogs tend to have shelf lives anyway, don't they. I mean people do them for a while, then stop, do something else and perhaps start another one. But I cannot finish Blogg without giving as good a reason as I started and sharing with you the experience of writing it even though that's pretty much what I've been doing from the beginning. It's also possible that the wind-up may be longer than the blog itself. Who's to say that there's not more to write about why one ends a blog than why one begins it? But (sorry) I'm not quite done yet. This is a sort of prequel to my consideration of stopping. Of course if I were to receive hundreds of desperate requests begging me not to stop, that would have an impact. So would Santa bringing me a new sled. So if one ends a blog it means one has said all he wants to say on the subject, the subject here being the writing of a blog, what blogs are etc. There is a compromise solution I may adapt which will make blogg even more labyrynthine. The three of you who allegedly have been with me from early on know that I have been going back and editing earlier entries for style and for shit I promised and didn't deliver on and to dis things like the radio gig. It could be that lurking in the revisions is some heavy stuff that I might want to go into in some detail. I am also curious as to how many bloggers revise at all. I can tell from my spelling errors alone that I don't. I feel like a little boy with a stick walking along the shore. He can hear his mother calling him, telling him lunch is ready, but isn't that the outline of a whale on the horizon. Does this make any sense at all? ISTHIS THE FIRST OF THE HUNDRETH TIME I HAVE TOLD YOU I AM GOING TO GO BACK AN EDIT EARLIER POSTS. MY BRAIN IS MUCH TOO FILLED WITH SUBSTANCE TO REMEMBER.

eblogg 1

MY GENERAL INCOMPETENCE NEVER SURPSISES ME BUT THE FACT THAT I HAVE HOPELESSLY GOTTEN LOST IN THE ORDER OF THE EDITING PROCESS, WHICH WAS THE WHOLE POINT OF IT (EDITING OLD STUFF FIRST) MAKES ME FEEL EVEN MORE CONTEMPT FOR MYSELF THAN USUAL. FORTUNATELY NONE OF THIS MATTERS AND I WILL NOT MENTION IT AGAIN SINCE I MENTION EVERYTHING ELSE 2000 TIMES. I have decided to change the name of my blog from Literal Ally (which was originally supposed to be literal-ly broken up until I realized I couldn't spell). I would change it on the title-- I may try later, but I am not sanguine about my prospects for success and someone has probably taken it anyway. Blogg sounds more like a dog or a cat, which is how I regard Blogg. It has occurred to me that one of the great difficulties in keeping this thing going is that there are no people in it besides me, the writer, and fascinating as I am, even I am bored with myself at this point. To allow other people in violates the terms of agreement I signed when I started Blogg.(OTHER PEOPLE? DO YOU HAVE A FRIEND I DON'T KNOW ABOUT?) There are, of course, my four followers (did I tell you I have four now-- I think that means three plus me). I could talk about my feelings that in the month or so I have been doing this I have acCreted one new person and how good/bad that makes me feel or it doesn't matter. I think ultimately it can't matter because then the emphasis shifts to popularity, reality, hits and all that shit, which is what I am alllegedly trying to avoid. And what is the point it is completely besides? I am going to dissect the blog. I am going to masticate it, dessicate it, masturbate it from the inside and out so that anyone who is dumb enough to read the whole thing, assuming it ever ends, will have "blogg" tattooed all over his body and will be regarded as some kind of insane hero by his peers, assuming he has some. One makes no assumptions regarding the social status of anyone who has enough time to piss away reading this in its hypothetical entirety. So I am standing there alone on the stage again. Let me entertain you. I could be sad that I have the time and nothing more important to do than piss it away doing this, or I could go genius, who cares what anybody thinks? but I think I have done that hat trick a few thousand times. It may be that I am actually running out of things to say. I will not, of course, know that for certain until tomorrow, when it is possible I will think of eons of new things. But I do feel a certain frisson of fatigue coming on. I think at some point soon I may require more feedback from the outside world. The radio is now playing a motet called CHRIST RISING FROM THE DEAD. I do not regard this as a coincidence. If any of my four followers, myself included, have any idea how and why to keep this going in a reasonably cheerful manner, could you please let me know asap. As worried as I am about having run out of things to say, as the thought of stopping it makes me feel like a failure. If stopping this makes me feel like a failure what makes me a success, doing it forever and having everyone in the world read it? Reasonable, no? CHRIST RISING FROM THE DEAD. THE HUMILITY SLAYS ME. AS FOR THE REST OF THIS ENTRY WE'VE HEARD IT ALL BEFORE IN LESS INCOMPREHENSIBLE MORE INTERESTING FORM. GO FUCK THE HOLY GHOST.

EBLANK

WHEN I SAW THE TITLE OF THIS POST I THOUGHT I HAD INTENTIONALLY LEFT A PAGE BLANK. HOPES DASHED. One of the most difficult parts of maintaining an institution like LA is that one periodically comes upon days when one has no interest in doing so.LIKE JUST ABOUT EVERY DAY. This is what separates the men from the boys.NO, THE MEN HAVE BIGGER PENISES. I could just have bagged the enterprise today, read the newspaper and spent the day as normally as I am capable of doing.(PICKING YOUR NOSE, PERHAPS?) But the little doohickey in the back of my brain said, "Don't skip today because it might encourage you to skip tomorrow and then weeks may go by and you will one day look at your handiwork and go 'Damn, this is good. Why the fuck did you stop doing it?'AND PENIES MAY FALL FROM HEAVEN. This is admittedly an unlikely scenario. But not having any particular interest in writing LA today is unlikely to result in any great difference from when I can't wait to get my fingers on the keyboard, although I do periodically have completely unjustified days when I think I am actually doing something significant.I WAS GOING TO DELETE THIS LAST SENTENCE BUT I LET IT REMAIN AS AN EXAMPLE OF HOW STUPID I CAN GET. IT'S UP THERE WITH THE MOST REPETITIOUS AND IDIOTIC. These days usually pass quickly with or without medication. If LA were a 500 page book I would be on page 211 now-- a hefty way to go before I get to the middle and no idea how the character I introduced at the beginning is going to interact with the character I introduced on page 125 which could pose a problem for the murder-suicide pact that is the climax of the novel and inspired it.THIS APPEARS TO BE A LAME ATTEMPT AT HUMOR On the other hand, what makes it easy to write LA when you don'T particularly feel like it is that in a matter of a sentence or two you are back in the thick of it. The only difference is that rather than complain about the concept of the whole thing, you complain about the 15 minutes it is taking from your life.ASSUMING ONE HAS ONE But Art is a hard taskmaster. I can't believe how quickly this entry is going and I do feel obliged to leave you with something more than the fact that I had no interest in writing it, which probably does not make you feel good about yourself--it's as if you're getting sloppy seconds or something. "OR SOMETHING," THE QUALITY OF THIS PROSE OVERWHELMS. Suppose I leave you with an inspirational thought that there are things in your own life that you don't feel like doing and sometimes when you do them you feel less worse than when you don't do them. I can also leave you with the thought that the whole is neither more nor less than the sum of its parts and if I didn't post today, when I posted tomorrow (assuming I did), I would be one day shy and in the mists of time LA might have been deprived of the bang-up ending it no doubt will have, besides being just one page shorter.Struggle over. Post completed. Limp wisdom given. Reader goes off to her no doubt exciting life. LA writer ponders whether he has fucked the whole thing up with a post even dumber than usual. IF YOU ARE PONDERING, YOU ARE EVEN DUMBER THAN I THOUGHT, WHICH IS TOUGH.

Albedo

It will take someone fanatical to connect the title. Just one of the little games I play to keep readers and myself amused. Coffeed, meditated and now blogging. A touch of melancholy in the air. I am "wasting" hours performing an activity that if I did not perform I would be that much younger and the world pretty much the same. There is also lurking around the thought that if you want to write, why don't you write a fucking book, where maybe you can make some money (ok, not a fat chance)but you've at least tapped in to the collective that stands for literature as opposed to whatever this is. But I have written books and I know that feeling, its triumphs and despair, usually which follow each other closely. What's fun about LA is that there is no formal critical apparatus for judging it. Indeed, as far as I am concerned there is no formal critical apparatus for distributing it in any significant number. You have to work at that part as hard as you work on your adjectives in a book. Here, a sloppy adjective won't cause you much harm, but a missed connection to readers can cost you thousands. So secretly, while you are all sleeping or eating cheesecake or whatever you do in real life, I am asking my younger, smarter friends how to maximize the distribution power of what I have wrought. My efforts so far have been feeble but I have received enough encouragement to seek out more. The blogging and the distribution of the blog are tied at the hip. My starting to blog without knowing how I was going to reach people was stupid but I had to start somewhere. Now, however, at least when I find means of spreading it there will be something to spread. Does the spreading result in any change in editorial context? You bet it does, just as stories are for story readers, novels for novel readers etc.
Are you (me) personally a blog reader? Are you out of your mind? Why would I waste my time reading shit like this when there are so many real books I have yet to read. But it is from the writing of the blog that I am gaining my benefit, learning a new (pardon the expression) art form, one that I believe will be so uqbiquitous in five years that the wold will be divided into those who can and those who can't. The world is already divided into those who can and those who can't. I fear I am drifting from my subject onto a screed about electronic media. Hopefully this is the last you will hear of it. It should be obvious to any reader that LA is not a terribly sophisticated instrument to be distributed on a sophisiticated instrument. Which, of course, is it's great virtue. You don't read LA. You read the instrument.

GOOD AND BAD HABITS

I was originally going to use the title section for aphorisms-- a vastly underrated form of literary communication. The aphormisms would be fairly off the wall and generally not have anything to do with the content, thus reinforcing the meaninglessness of it all. It didn't work. I found myself thinking too hard and too long for an appropriately meaningless aphorism and it started to feel like thinking for meaning. So now, as you can see, they are limp and meaningless but do not threaten the architecture of the whole. Speaking of the whole, I detect a note of seriousness creeping in. I noticed that during my morning meditation I was thinking of what I was going to write in LA. What I write in LA should be meaningless and unplanned. My God, this is man's search for meaning. What this proves to me, assuming my logic is logical, which it probably is not, is that content is secondary to the emotions that put it forth. I can write about nothing as seriously as Tolstoy wrote about War and Peace. If we had a content-o-meter, I am convinced we would finish neck and neck. If we had a read-o-bility meter, my neck wouldn't even get in the picture, but that's another story. As I stare back here from the heights of Olympus, I wonder if I have kept true to my word of keeping LA pure. The editing process is a mixed bag. It shows me where I've been, helps me eliminte shreds of substance that may have crept in but it also adds to the seriousness and self-consciousness of the effort. It's like putting a bell on your rope when you jump rope.You are still jumping rope as often as you ever were and people are watching you as often as they ever did. But there is this bell that you have no idea what to do with. Why is it here? Does it detract from the jumping effort? Should I remove it? Is Istanbul Constantinople. Answer: It doesn't matter what I say, text or edits, as long as I say it entertainingly and if you edit nothing, you can't get something, even if, as I believe, when you either multiply or add two negative numbers you get a positive result. But is it positive in terms of reading pleasure or content? Who cares? Are we having fun yet?