Ego

Blogs are supposed to be quick reads. Nobody wants to get overwhelmed with dense or difficult material. We as writers ought to be terse and witty, ironic but not cynical, observant but not insulting, like little children skulking in the corners. We are not supposed to have egos, for we are just words on a page. Words on a page do not have desires, they never wake up in the morning with a stomach ache splitting their lower abdomen, they never wonder what to wear (their fonts are chosen for them by the big impersonal writer, the ghost behind the machine), they are slight and thin and very proper. They are flies on the wall, recording the sometimes beautiful events of human bustle from up a tree across the street through the fog: births, brises, recitals, workouts, ATM visits, lunches, laughter, drinking, walking, sitting, skipping, twirling, ululating, dancing, buffering, playing a musical instrument and on and on. We are white on black within lines of HTML; there is no intent behind a freely published site. There ought to be no appeal to friends to better themselves, no lovesick pages spilling with curves, lines, esses, accents, dashes--and blood.

Writers shoud not make long lists of things; those tend to make the reader's eyes glaze over. They should not fall in love with their writing. They have to let it do its own thing, even if that involves going to the club without him several nights a week and stumbling home drunk and reeking of another man even through the whiskey. They have to trust. No wonder they are so thin! Or, alternately, they are pear-shaped from sitting in the corner under the lamp while reading and eating the cake and drinking the vodka. Under the burnt out lamp. In the dark.

But at least writers, by being ephemeral non-ego nonentities, avoid being little question-mark shaped twigs bent over in front of a screen, paying their respects to the omnipotent machine god, that metal and plastic and electric Moloch!

Where was I going with all this?

Stolen quote: "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."