Like an everything pizza, you have made your blog into a bit of this, a bit of that...
I guess it is a more rounded expression of you as a person, but for the life of me, do you expect ANYONE to be interested in all (or even most) of your subjects?
with this cut-to-the-quick comment to my last post, noblesavage (who, although he loves me, knows better than most how to play the truth game), challenges my scattershot approach to blogging--and once again i'm forced to think about what i'm trying to accomplish here.
would i like to attract buttloads of readers to this site? fuck yeah i would--i pay about as much attention to people who say shit like "i really don't care if anybody reads my blog; i'm just doing it for me" as i do to women in west los angeles who claim their boob jobs are just so they can feel good about themselves.
look, you publish a blog, you're putting yourself out there and you're looking for validation in the form of readership and feedback. and, to the degree you achieve same, you experience that connection with humanity that i think all humans crave and all bloggers seek--and that's gotta be a great feeling. seriously, i can't even imagine what it must be like to know that dozens (much less hundreds or thousands) of your fellow humans make a check of your blog a part of their daily routine--what a mind-blowing high it must be to know that there are that many folks out there vibrating at your frequency.
and since i discovered the blogosphere around mid-2005, i managed to figure out that most successful blogs--no matter how different they may be from one another--tend to be alike in that each has some sort of consistent, cohesive theme; i.e., their readers, once attracted, can reasonably expect to get more of whatever attracted them in the first place each time they return.
which, knowing that, makes what i've done with this blog all the more inexplicable--because, as noblesavage has so eloquently pointed out, god only knows what random hell you're gonna walk into when you click over here on any given day--and how the fuck am i supposed to build readership that way?
consider his point: in this last week alone, politically-oriented types attracted by my analysis of the scott mcclellan thing might have come back the next day for more only to discover that all of a sudden i'm talking about the ins and outs of gay sex. and then all my gay-sex aficionados probably came back the day after that to see what i had to say about bad sex only to find themselves instead assaulted not only by the insult of bad music but, on top of that, the injury of bad hair.
what can i say? noblesavage is absolutely right--i'm all over the place with this blog, and if i were smart, i'd do it differently.
problem is, i like doing it this way--even if nobody gives a rat's ass, i can't tell you how much more fun i had writing about skeeter davis drunk than i did about scott mcclellan sober. it was what i wanted to write about at that point in time, and i did it, and i'm glad--it dredged up a long-forgotten memory, and now i have it to look back on whenever i feel like it. and yeah, i tend to go off-topic a lot these days--i know it's undisciplined, and probably off-putting to a lot of people.
all of which makes the fact that i can always count on at least a couple dozen people to come back here on any given day to see what i have to say all the more amazing (and, whether you know it or not, i thank each and every one of you angels every goddam day you show up for more of this shit).
bottom line: fuck convention--as much as a wide following would make my dick hard and wet, truth is, i'm an odd duck, and i guess i'd rather put myself out there like i really am from day to day and scare off the majority for the sake of the few who get me, than market one or two carefully-cultivated aspects of myself and go for the big kill.
does any of this make sense?
4 comments:
Mikey:
I've had several blogs over the years, and with the exception of 'Purple Girl', they were definitely all over the map.
One day I could be waxing poetic about my first fisting experience, the next about how awful Medicare D is for its' recipients. I never much cared who read my blog (in spite of having a bit of a following I'd built up over a couple of years) because I truly believed that I was writing for me.
And that's how it should be...at least how I see your blog. You're writing for yourself, about yourself, maybe a little for an audience, but if you really cared about having an audience you'd have custom tailored your posts a long time ago.
And please don't start now.
Yeah, you know the score, kid - nobody reads this crap, you think...hahaha! Jesus! My blog is read by the world and it perplexes me - I have no idea who these fucks are.
I egotistically put up one of those pin maps to keep track of these freaks - to the point of asking a roll call. Nope, guess my malstrom existance is just a dirty pleasure to them.
But, it is an addiction. Fame - no matter what scale, she is an insidious bitch.
judi: i guess it's true--one of the reasons i started this blog was because i thought that if i forced upon myself the discipline of writing something every day maybe writing would become less painful (and that might actually be starting to happen); also, we can't forget the narcissistic "blogging as therapy" element. oh, and there's the "if you don't write it down, it never happened" documentation thing (fine, three reasons).
whatever; even though the place is a mess, thanks for reading--seriously.
luis: many mysteries in this life, but the question as to why lots of people show up at your door for their daily dose of borrowed flesh ain't one of 'em.
Well...I have to say I pretty much comment upon everything you write. Some of posts you have done, I find more interesting than other posts.
But what can I say, I love ya....even if you are just this side of crazy. Turns out that the truth is that we all are.
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