the coffee chronicles

It’s interesting when things get so busy that my leisure priorities change.

Okay, perhaps “interesting” is a poor choice of words for a state so scattered, so manic, so I’m-at-the-end-of-my-rope-please-leave-me-the-$#@!-alone that busy just doesn’t cut it as an adjective. Such has been the last few days, given my priorities having split among home, work, and just the commonplace “getting-by” of life among the cannibals.

What I claim to be the interesting part only sets in, I think, once one can sit back - preferably with a frosty can of Pabst Blue Ribbon - and take stock of what was lost in the transaction. Do some personal accounting, that sort of thing. Take blogging, for instance; writing inane things to no-one in particular is quite the leisurely thing to do, and fairly relaxing at that. But just when my life has the slimmest chance of becoming interesting - anecdotal, so to speak, parenthetically just the sort of thing a good friend told me to avoid at all costs - real priorities come rushing in, like so many beggars tugging at my sleeve. We all have those ironies, I think.

Of course, when it comes to our shared lives in the blogosphere, it all comes down to brass tacks: if you make your life about your blog, everything you do becomes bloggable; put another way, if everything is worth mentioning, your blog simply writes itself. As an added bonus, “real life” never gets in the way, because that’s what the blog is about in the first place. Take Dooce, for instance. Heather Armstrong (everyone’s favorite Shit Ass Ho Motherfucker) is a modern-day pop-literary hero - of a sort - for what she’s accomplished. First, by getting fired for the content of her blog (”Getting Dooced,” as she calls it, or as I prefer, “Pulling a Dooce”) she created an entirely new life for herself, a life which is supported in whole by the business proceeds of her on-line existence. Read her story here - and check out the blog itself, which is pretty pithy stuff. Or Jason Kottke, of course who also runs his blog full-time; gotta love these pioneers who can turn a digital experiment into a way of life. As far as I can tell, his “remaindered links” are the most famous form of useless information that I’ve ever seen, and he pretty much invented the art form (I’ve been trying to implement “Asides” as much the same thing). There’s a reason why these folks are on my blogroll; I mean, really.

As an aside, consider the blog: are the kids still calling it that these days? It seems almost passe to use the word, and yet it just piles up on itself; it’s like the randy rabbit of the dictionary. Maybe that’s why enterprising folks are starting to notice the use of the term blag. Well, it’s about time. (Side not to the side note: it’s curious how Urban Dictionary cites xkcd as the erstwhile inventor of the term. Ah, to be immortalized on UD.)

In short, I realize - as I have on numerous other occasions when I’ve sunk to the level of blog anxiety - that it’s not really about anything specific one writes, it’s just that one keeps writing. I mean, since no-one can figure out what the $#@! Pagerank is about, anyway, we might as well keep typing away.