Reflections On My Reflection
I'm posting something earlier than usual on Monday in order to distance myself as quickly as possible from yesterday's traumatic post.

I've noticed something: my posts seem to be getting shorter and shorter.

I used to know where I fit in the blogosphere. When I first got here back in July, I could look around and see the different styles. Some people wrote polemics, some wrote poems (really really bad poems), some were journal-keepers, some were journalists, list-makers, fiction writers, joke-writers, cat fanciers and outright stalkers. People had styles.

I always sort of thought of myself as an essayist. I wrote (big long awful) introductions, some kind of a body followed by a conclusion. Since a blog post is always a first-draft I rarely ever made my actual point, but the intent was there, codified in the structure.

Now as I look back at the last several weeks, the posts are somewhat shorter. They're punchier, sharper, they include images where tireless, swerving paragraphs of up to 1,000 words used to suffice.

If I were forced to categorize my writing style right now I think I'd have to call myself a blogger. Yeeuch. I'm a bloody internet neologism

But all is not lost. My conversion is still in question. I have several thousand dollars' worth of unpaid student loans to remind me of my training as an insufferable prattler. Action must be taken while I am still in flux, before inertia sets in and my ability to stupefy an audience under an avalanche of words completely atrophies.

I mean, I just recently finished the first half of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and I never even mentioned it. Never mentioned it. In the old days that would have been 5,000 words of pseudo-intellectual hoo-ha in the grand tradition of my famous Brothers Karamazov retrospective.

Something needs to be done.

I'd by lying if I weren't somewhat torn, though. On the one hand I miss the old Pops, the one who once wrote 4 single-spaced pages about how there weren't enough women named Nancy. But then I kind of admire my burgeoning ability to bore people with half the effort.

As much as I miss the old me, that last part is nothing to sneeze at.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 10.0


Pops


PS- I may be posting 3-7 times daily until yesterday's post is gone from the Current Posts page. So you might get the Tocqueville thing anyway if I can't think of anything else. Unfortunately for you people, I don't even own a cat.
- posted by Pops @ 9:35 AM