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?