Pops Caritas Est
I'm very grateful to Blogger for all it has done for me. It's hard to complain about a service that is ego-nourishing, personally aggrandizing and completely free. Once you leave public school, it's sometimes difficult for adults to find a place with the right kind of safe, inviting environment in which to completely humiliate themselves.

I am sort of annoyed with Blogger in that I only seem to notice what they are doing when they fuck something up. And believe me, they've fucked plenty of things up. All my most brilliant, world-beating posts have been lost, sucked away into cyber-oblivion by various Blogger hiccups. You think some of this crap has been entertaining, you should have seen the crap that got lost! It vibrated; it hummed; it glowed, soft yet brilliant, like well-polished gold. I wish you could have seen it.

See, now I'm inviting people to look at my crap. If that doesn't sum up blogging completely, I don't know what does.

When Blogger does good things, however, you hardly notice. They don't do a very good job at all of letting people know when new features arrive. For instance I just found out they added a post-counter to the Blogger dashboard! Did you people realize that? For all I know it's been up there for six months, but I didn't notice. You better believe I noticed when their original post counter thing failed to work; I even wrote a highly emotional e-mail. Once I finally convinced the police that, no, I neither had a working thermonuclear device in my position nor did I even know where the Blogger people were headquartered, that whole incident sort of just blew over.

You know what I did find out from my new post-counter thing though? This is my 504th post! Yay me!

The 504th post is a special, special day in a blogger's career. For some people, it takes three years. For others it takes about a month and a half. For all of us, it means the same things: 1) I stopped paying close attention to post numbers sometime before I reached 500, thus the +4 oversight and 2) it's possible that I may have been doing this for too long.

For some people, that second realization could lead to all kinds of self-examination and light a fire under them to leave the stagnant, masturbatory world of blogging behind and go out there and find themselves a life. Luckily for you, not so for me. I love me a rut. The only thing I love more than a rut is stagnant masturbation. I ain't going no-place.

These sort of numerical milestones are important as they give one a moment to reflect on the weight and scope of the body of work that has been developed. It is also an excellent, very helpful break from having to think of something to write about. "It's my 504th post!" just sort of screams for attention.

July 2004 was a long, long time ago. I know my motivations and rationalizations for why I do this blog thing have changed in subtle yet important ways since I started, but I'm not 100% sure how or why. I could launch into a lengthy dissection of the inner workings of my psyche to understand the interplay between personality and knowledge and the development of the self in a context mediated by circumstance and time. Or I could just ask.

POPS OF THE NOW: Hello?

HISTORICAL POPS OF JULY 2004: Fuck off. I'm busy.

POTN: I know.

HP: You know what?

POTN: I know what you're up to. You're starting a blog.

HP: What's a blog?

POTN: It's a thing on the internet where you type stuff and then publish it for all the world to see. It's a gateway to guaranteed fame and fortune through the written word, just as you've always wanted.

HP: That sounds like a lot of work. Plus I might miss reruns of Deep Space 9 on Spike. Fuck off.

POTN: Uh... you... um... can't not blog.

HP: Why the fuck not? Come on, you're making me miss this. This is the episode where that bitch with the wrinkly nose is really angry about something.

POTN: You have to start a blog. Have. To.

HP: No.

POTN: I'm not presenting you with options, I'm just saying it's temporally and existentially impossible for you not to. If you don't start a blog, I--the You of the Now--couldn't possibly exist.

HP: You mean this conversation would never have taken place?

POTN: At the very least.

HP: Sold! Now fuck off.

POTN: All right, fine. Just so you know though: Bush wins.

HP: What did you say?

POTN: In the election in November. You don't know it yet, but Bush wins.

HP: Get the fuck out of here. No one would be stupid enough to vote for him. He's retarded.

POTN: I'm serious. He wins 49 states in 2004. Everything except Tennessee, ironically. It's a goddamn shame.

HP: Are you serious?

POTN: Can you afford to gamble that I'm not?

HP: Fine, I'll start a bog.

POTN: Blog.

HP: Whatever. But only to save mankind from itself. Now fuck off so I can get started.

Wow. That was something of a surprise. Who knew I had such a direct influence in my own decision to start my blog. Very manipulative of me, I must say. I didn't like lying to myself about the size of the Bush victory in the election, but something had to be done. Besides, who can say for sure that I lied? Kerry didn't win, but maybe if I hadn't started blogging in July of '04, Bush really would have won 49 states. Moral victories don't count for much in politics, but they do in the sense that I was not so despondent after the election that I didn't immediately kill myself or worse, move to Canada. I just wrote some mopey blogposts about it.

To future Popses I say: way to go, Pops. Keep up the good work.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 10.0


Pops
- posted by Pops @ 10:24 AM