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Never mind “meaning of life,” I’m just looking for “meaning of blog.”
Sometimes I leave a warm sensual bed to go sit over at my table in the early morning to post—is it worth it? I am wondering, now, for this landmark 75th entry. It’s been a year since I started with an obligatory “about me” post.
Category
Should I specialize? Other bloggers do. This while my favourite essayist, George Orwell, in London during WWII, wrote a regular essay column called “As I Please” which referred to his wide ranging choices. And my favourite novel-writing essayist, John Scalzi, calls his site “Whatever” meaning that, like Orwell, he wrote whatever he pleased. My own blog has no narrow topic either, since I am pleased to explore “new to-me-or-others” concepts. After all, there are new babies being born every minute who don’t know all the concepts out there. Like finding new words, I find no end to new discoveries, such as Orwell’s idea that political writing is to hide the truth.
Lamenting
So what “should” I write? Forget “sex, drugs and rock and roll;” others will blog that. Forget the eye-opening stuff Orwell wrote, which changed my life, because although his essays are still in print, nobody reads them. —Oh, remembering another good essayist: I think Paul Fussell’s essays are already out of print. Such a pity, as I can still remember where I was when I read his sweet essay Thank God For the Atom Bomb.
Fussell was in the infantry, like me. During the war, unlike folks in safer space-times, he had a vested interested in seeing the enemy as demons… Otherwise he could have still been safely back home, spanking his little boy, like Popeye in the cartoons, saying, “This will hurt me worse than it hurts you.” You won’t leave behind your boy, your wife, and your crops only half grown, not unless you believe the war is horribly important, and the horrible bad guys are labeled as “the enemy.” It does not “hurt me worse” to fight against demons. If my blog is for concepts, then here’s your concept for the day: If you’re too goddam lazy to demonize terrorists, then you have no business declaring war on terror.
Had Orwell lived, he might have posted reflections on whether he felt worse (—like in the final chapter of another Englishman’s War of the Worlds—) for serving with the Republican army in Spain. Orwell was invalided out by a fascist bullet through his throat, which undoubtably saved his life. Saving him to remember Spain in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Had George lived until the cure for tuberculosis, perhaps he would have flown with another wounded veteran, Daniel, with their red tail light disappearing towards Spain.
Meaning
Today, my blog is losing meaning for me. This amidst a public less caring for blogs as there’s more competition from more things, including but-not-limited-to cable streaming, video games and social media. I’m lost partly because I’m not in Toastmasters anymore. (stupid covid) There I would often test out my essays as speeches, getting real-time feedback for what people cared about. If they cared, I cared too. I’ve noticed how, for blogs and sports, it’s hard to “give a care” when nobody else does. Living far from Florida, I won’t get excited at the latest TV sports broadcasts of Jai alai and greyhound racing. I’d rather watch the flamingos.
I hate it when I feel equal parts excitement and loneliness. A fellow intellectual once told me, more bitter than sad, “I’m the only one in Calgary reading War and Peace right now.”
I liked how my fellow toastmasters always brought out the comedian in me whenever I made a speech, with one member saying, “I don’t think Sean can ever not be funny when he speaks.” Maybe I could put humour into my blog.
Changes
Right then, humour. I’m only halfway through gleaning my Free Fall archives, so I won’t be creating new humour material for a while. What else? Curiously, my Free Fall Friday peers, except for my funny fiction, tended to like my essays more than my stories, so maybe I should tend to post those.
Maybe I should be grabbing people by the lapels right at the first sentence. (Or is that pandering?) I had been expecting readers would find my home page, then see six individual posts and then, say, skim past the “explanation of Free Fall Friday” part to click on the essay. Well, maybe I had naive expectations. I guess I could do like Winnie the Pooh, who cheerfully starts every new chapter by saying “In Which…”
Free-fall
This is my 75th; at my evaluative 50th post (March 2021) I decided to subsequently paste in more-than-half stuff written during meetings with cheerful fellow writers for Friday Free Fall, posting an assortment of fiction, nonfiction and poetry pieces. Let’s hope my Friday pieces aren’t chaff.
If “meaning” of a blog is “having readers,” then I guess I could kickstart getting more eyeballs by publishing the best posts of my old blog. Some of those were google-labeled by perfect strangers as “liked” or “translated” or “forwarded.” But no. Let’s not cast wheat on forsaken ground.
Epilogue
My most popular essay so far has been where I explored Patriarchy and Hierarchy. (December 2020) so I’m glad I wrote that one. … Say, if you have been pondering “the patriarchal tyranny,” wondering whether we are all living as “members” of oppressed groups, competing with other groups, while a few upper-class-white males are sailing serenely above the fray, then you might like When Others Meet Others. (June 2021)
…
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Sean Crawford
During peacetime,
July 2021
Notes:
~Next evaluation will be at my 100th post, if I get that far.
~If ever Orwell’s gritty classic was illustrated, except by Reader’s Digest, then it would be with charcoal sketches. No pretty pastels. And I tell you, some of the most science fictional aspects of the novel actually happened. See his memoir about Catalonia. (Actually, RD once ran the beginning chapters)
~To remind myself I can do humour, I might re-read A Cluttered Cave, with Onion (May 2021) I chose to make that essay funny because anyone publishing this topic would have cartoons, and pretty colours, never serious pictures. We need comedy because at heart clutter is tragedy.
~Fussell knew people aren’t attracted to “essays,” so he called his collection “observations.” If this was pandering to the public then I forgive him.
~My favourite nonfiction-writing web essayist is Paul Graham.
