I ramble with the best of them

or it was very difficult to be as serious as I was throughout this

Lately, I’ve been trying to figure out my place in the blogosphere. As there are so many of these

little blogs, whether personal or professional, one really begins to wonder about the spread of their readership. In the past few days, I’ve become enamored with AmericaBlog. It’s posts are often and it’s readership high; readers leave comments on each article often running into the high fifties. Even CNN has used it as a source for a few of it’s stories, GannonGuckert being the most resent. But I’m running a personal site. A site solely based on my own writing about myself or topics I wish to discuss. My readership probably doesn’t stretch past myself and a few select friends who I’ve told about this thing. And, for one, that’s a good thing. If other people began reading my posts they may become violently bored by the pointless materials the site houses, or develop some kind of deep seeded resentment for some of the comments I post. And I’m all right with that. After all, I tend not to use the most remarkable grammatical form and ignore some obvious spelling errors; yes, I know that they’re there. The question remains, what is my place in the blogosphere?

Grammatical ignorance aside, I remain a writer by proxy. I have a degree in creative and

professional (basic web design) writing, and find myself in a field that doesn’t require me to use my “talents” as much as I would have hoped. So, I find myself here, posting a blog or two a day (if I’m lucky) to defuse my lust for the clickity-clack of the keyboard or the aesthetics of a mechanical pencil against a sheet in a notebook. I suppose my purpose retains the same quality it did while I was in college, to hone my writing in an effective manner, but has any progress be reached? Am I still just as good as I was almost a year ago? Perspicacity and jargon aside, I’d like to think it has. I’d like to think that my writing has developed in positive ways, as well as negative but I’ll try to remain on the former, and I’m able to better grow thoughts and ideas and to present them in a more precise and succinct fashion. That’s a statement, not a rhetorical question. I really do believe that my writing has improved, vastly.

Now that I’ve tooted my own horn and rang my own bell, I’ll reverse my deviation; what point

does this blog have other than for my own pleasure and posterity? None. There is no other point. I’m writing this for myself, and I’m not sure that I, frankly, give a damn what, if any, effect it may have on the blogosphere. I’m not saying that if people were to read this and it was able to provide some kind of service to them that I would be disappointed, on the contrary. What I am saying is that this site is a provision of myself. It’s a deviation yet convergence of myself, and will, I hope, continue to act as a room of my own (to steal an ideal from Virginia Wolff) for as long as I am able to continue to type (when ever I lose working ability in my hands, for whatever reason) and perhaps beyond.

This is the purpose of and job of this site for me. It is a blog within the blogosphere that is my own

brain. Ignoring its larger capacity as a bank for thought, reason and idea for anyone who wishes to use it, it is, more importantly to me, a bank for my thoughts, reasons and ideas to be stored away instead of dashed against the walls of my own brain. Let me explain, my mind works like a shotgun, to provide as violent an image as any. Ideas sprout up, are loaded up and fired within the confines of my brain. If they’re caught in mid-air by the giant purple monkey (I originally had ‘gorilla in there instead of ‘monkey,’ but decided that ‘monkey’ was funnier) and fed out through my hands or mouth, then great, if not they crash into my skull and are lost. Now, that gorilla is incapable of catching all of those shotgun shells. Many of them are lodged into the bone to be left to rot away, forgotten. Whichever bullets are caught provide me with something to say or write or hope to remember, often to no avail, for later. That’s how I work. The blogosphere is my brain, and the blog and my own gawking jaw are what I’m able to get out of the blogosphere.

How does this pertain to other people’s blogs? First off, other people’s blogs provide me with more

ammo for my brain to fire off wildly. Their ideas can form new ideas for me to talk or write about. Second, and clearly pertaining to this posting, each blog (on the net) is similar to my own blog (the giant purple monkey) in relation to the mass that is the blogosphere. Each blog (idea) makes up this giant working network (blogosphere) that is the working brain.

So, I’ve surmised, while writing this, my blog’s purpose in the world, and all I had to do was waste

a lot of time at work when I could have been sitting around waiting for my boss to call me about this project I’ll be working on next week. And then I realize that this passes for a closing paragraph. Maybe I haven’t made any progress at all…damn, I have the flu and it sucks.