If I were to personify my blog (in all its forms from all its hosts, from the day I started blogging ‘til now) I would have to describe what would initially appear to be an elderly gentleman who, it would seem, had recently been battered about the head and shoulders with a pillowcase filled with a variety dead fish. Upon closer inspection one would discover that its not an elderly man at all, but an extremely malnourished middle-aged fellow with poor posture and the possibility of scurvy or an early untreated case of rickets; plus, he’s wet himself recently and taken to stapling raw bacon to his shirt sleeves…or, maybe he’s a half man, half turtle sin against nature, who’s wearing one of those plastic Halloween masks, you know, from the seventies that they don’t make anymore, and a lab coat covered with his own feces and he’s begging for spare change outside of the local Subway sandwich shop and just generally making everyone feel somewhat uncomfortable and itchy.
What I’m getting at here is that my blog as a person is very sick and either in the need of serious medical and psychological attention, or to be taken out to a remote field and shot several times before being covered up with a thin layer of dirt, eventually to be found by wolves or other scavengers.
At this moment I’m putting stock into antibiotics and shock therapy…I’ve been virtually vomiting my activities, whims and ideas into this little unread corner of the digital world far too long to not give it a fighting chance….plus, I’ve been claiming him as a dependent on my Tax Returns for these many years, so there’s that.
The Cradle of Life or the MySpace Vagina
Say what you will about the ghost-town formally known (and still known, I suppose) as MySpace…but not only do I credit it for my introduction into this narcissistic habit of blogging, but its also where this now shrink-wrapped-with-pudding-skin looking ribcage of a journal was at its healthiest; sporting a few hundred readers and comment conversations that sometimes rivaled the initial posts itself.
My blog walked tall, sporting a bright white flawless smile and a full head of hair. It nodded to the ladies, paid its taxes and stepped out of the shower to pee. It went to sleep knowing that these were the salad days.
A Short Pass Through the Live Journal Tundra and the Beginning Stages of Illness
But, while it was MySpace that in a sense parented my blog, it was starting to resemble more the creepy uncle that you don’t want to leave your child alone with….the one with one hand always in his trouser pocket….the one that wears “trousers” in the first place…and has rumored to have a collection of movies for “special friends”. I spent an increasingly larger amount of time filtering through the “check out my naughty web cam pics” comments on both my blog and profile wall, that I finally saw fit to join the mass exodus and jump the MySpace ship allowing it to sink alone in its own sea of underage daddy-issues.
My little blog found itself alone now on a cold barren ice wasteland known as Live Journal, where its first coughs developed I believe. Life there was short, as I moved quickly to Google’s Blogger, before the zombie hordes of LJ set upon me with inquiries as to why I wasn’t writing about Green Issues or joining them in ganging up on whatever other blogger they happened to disagree with that week.
The move from Live Journal to Blogger, and the Steady Decline into Physical Sickness and Dangerous Insanity
One of the causes of this journal’s present state does have to do with the couple moves to new locations and the loss of readership as people fell from the wagon train only to be devoured by scavengers or the natives. But let’s be honest, an even larger part has to due with my loss of focus over time leaving readers fed up and lost to the saloons unable to afford whores or being killed during a poker game gone wrong….I have no idea where the wild west references are coming from.
I started writing these posts in a time of serious transition, having just come out of a relationship unexpectedly, quitting my job, moving to New York, leaving New York, finding myself in Denver. It was a few years of a seemingly endless Limbo….and writing ridiculous things to an unseen audience was in some way cathartic. But with the settling here in Colorado came a new focus, I suppose. I had the intentions of taking my passion more serious and having the blog reflect that. I think you few readers left know how that has gone (queue tumbleweed bouncing by). The blog has suffered serious neglect the past few years I’ve lived here, leaving in this present state of long few and far between ramblings, wild eyed and stinking of moose piss. And while I believe that my intentions to make the blog appear more “professional” were good, I have to admit to myself and to you that there really is almost nothing professional about me.
My mother summed me up almost perfectly years ago with the phrase “Just Because”. I was her ‘Just Because Son’, due to the fact that whenever questioned on why I would draw or write or do the things that I did, that was typically my response. The second that there was meaning or a goal attached to something, I would almost always lose interest.
I’m still this way. And I think it’s the primary reason for this blog’s neglect. It’s not that I couldn’t write about my artwork in a professional matter, it’s that trying to do so exclusively made any and all updates painfully unappealing to me….and apparently I left the blog locked in a dark basement with a damp sponge for nourishment.
Where does all this bring us? Am I giving the blog pills and the promise of a new start in a room with sun, or am I just giving it a small break while I polish the shotgun? I don’t know. I didn’t intend for this post to ramble on this long, so maybe that’s a good sign that I’m letting go and getting back to the “Just Because” reason for writing (good sign for who, I couldn’t say)….or maybe I accidentally left the basement door unlocked and this here journal is wandering around some looking for toast crusts before I kick it back down the stairs and take away it’s cartoon Sunday privileges. We’ll all just have to wait and see……just because.
