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Oceanside Pier, thirty seconds

Monday, April 5, 2010

Care and feeding of a blog


The sticky, magnetic lure of cyberspace must be faced with strict discipline and rigid perimeter fencing. Now with my ghostly creation well into its third year, and refreshed with startling consistency, it takes on a life of its own. When the guilt meter flashes on top of the laptop and the internal siren starts going off, I know that the darn thing must be fed.

I have doing this long enough so that I can basically pick my spots. Maybe wait until something hits me as curious and funny, until I have something that I truly think is worthy of sharing. And you folks are kind enough not to poke a stick in my eye when I fail to hit the apple. Those that have no use for it quickly weed themselves out.

My hits stay fairly consistent when I am not posting, based on the sheer volume of blather already published for eternal posterity. You never truly die in cyberspace, you live on forever in heavenly cache memory. And we all know that I can not truly stop, my public protestations to the contrary are usually quickly dashed. It's fun and frankly, a narcissist's died and went to heaven. I have lurkers, I have a bevy of foreign readers who tune in with regularity, it makes me feel really good and frankly honored. With a minimum of spelling errors and syntaxual sins.


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Facebook is a whole 'nother affair. I was on and then I was off and now I am back on again. There are several problems with this whole gadget, I will only land on a few. This whole notion of suggesting friends to you. You end up with so many marginal people that you would never really care to converse with in real life but don't want to offend. Then you marginalize your own work because you can only communicate in 144 digit stanzas and who in the hell needs more than that anyway? And you have to self censor because the muggles won't get it. Lately, I have been getting a lot of Facebook fribbits (my word) lately where people think it cool to throw out a line from a song and then let it sit there basking in its godlike profundity. How about find your own damn profundity?

The good writers quickly rise to the top in your Facebook circle. In mine it's Roy Cohen and his clan. I was even invited to a Mancation event in Nebraska with these guys, sharp as tacks and primed for trouble. Don't know if I will go it's in June. Strange to meet people on the basis of online writing, a decidedly 21st century medium for association.

Today I am going to meet Facebook friends who appeared out of the Facebook void, an activist couple who are very witty and on top of things. My first meeting with Facebookers on the physical plane, how scary.


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The thing is, especially for outre uber communicator types, you have to exercise some self restraint or you find yourself living in that universe and stop attending to normal bodily functions, like hygiene and exercise. So you have to know when to call it quitsies and shuck the whole thing for a while. Will let you know about my cyber date.