META-BLOG POST

The heavy-set bald man with a goatee sat in front of the computer – he was tired and didn’t feel like writing, but he had written about that so many times that it was no longer interesting (not even to him) – still, he had to write something – for years his friends had told him that he ought to write a blog – “it’ll be great,” they said – “people will want to read it,” they said – he knew that it wasn’t great and as far as he could tell, the only people reading the blog were the friends who’d told him to write it – actually, he didn’t even know that for sure because after the first couple of posts, people had ceased to leave comments – he found this very uninspiring – was it really too much to leave a comment and a name after reading? He reminded himself that he was not writing these posts for other people to read – considering that there are over 100 million blogs out there, it’s highly unlikely that someone might happen upon his and begin reading and enjoying it – he also reminded himself that he wrote solely for the pleasure and the discipline of it – in the same spirit that some (insane?) people prepare for and run marathons or play golf or build little airplanes that actually fly – some not very accomplished painters paint because it is sometimes pleasurable to do so – he wondered if those same unaccomplished painters had to make themselves paint even when they didn’t feel like it because if they didn’t paint now (when they didn’t particularly feel like it) they might never paint again – when he’d finally decided to write this blog, he made it a goal to write at least one post every month for a year – he’d thought that this would be easily achievable – he’d even allotted a couple of ten minute slots during week in which work on it – but as is so often the case, he’d ignored the plan and here he was (again) at the end of the month having written nothing – he’d even made a plan for what to write about – he was supposed to be writing about work and how work is really a blessing and fulfillment is a state of mind – he was so full of this sort of bullshit that it oozed from his very pores – he could go on and on about shit like that for hours – a couple of minutes might be inspirational, but he had a unique gift for taking the inspirational and stretching it into the sort of tedium that can typically only be achieved by lines in government agencies – he was thinking about all these things and about how he didn’t feel like writing about work or anything else really and he was looking for a way to cheat – a way to not write, but still meet the monthly goal – it was then that he remembered that a little over a year ago, he had discovered a list of surrealist techniques on Wikipedia and he’d thought it might be fun to try to go through them one by one and try to do verbally what the surrealists had done visually – that’s what he’d thought, but the first one, aerography, had given him some trouble – he’d had no idea how or why a three-dimensional object would be used as a stencil and even less of an idea how he would translate that idea into words – but then he’d started playing around with it – a stencil is just a way of translating the idea of an object onto a page – like a symbol – so what would constitute a three-dimensional way of bringing forth a symbol in words – an idea had occurred to him – the idea was about a man typing about a man typing about a man typing [ad infinitum] – he’d figured that it would either turn out to be mildly clever or completely stupid – it had, in fact, failed to achieve either of those outcomes – it was neither a hit nor a miss – it’d been like one of those darts that gets stuck in the outer frame of the dartboard – it’s not worth anything, but it didn’t miss the board completely – a couple of weeks after he’d written it, he’d been reading The Stinky Cheese Man to his two beautiful daughters when he came across “Jack’s Story” and realized that not only was his little idea not original, but that Jon Scieszka had done it with much more purpose and flair (a bull’s eye, to extend the previous metaphor) – it might have bothered him more except that he really liked Jon Scieszka and the fact that he’d independently thought of something that Jon Scieszka had done made him feel kind of clever after all – after further consideration, however, it occurred to him that both he an Scieszka had probably both come across this little rouse somewhere before (although he could not begin to imagine/remember where or when) and that he should not feel clever about it at all – so he’d stopped feeling clever and he continued to not feel clever and he figured that as long as he did not feel clever, there was no point in trying to be clever – and as long as he did not feel like writing, there was no point in trying to write something from scratch – instead, what he ought to do is borrow the aerography idea and re-use it for the post (it wasn’t doing him any good just sitting in the Word file) – with all this in his mind, he put his fingers on the page and began to type:

“The heavy-set bald man with a goatee sat in front of the computer – he was tired and didn’t feel like writing, but he had written about that so many times that it was no longer interesting (not even to him) – still, he had to write something – for years his friends had told him that he ought to write a blog – “it’ll be great,” they said – “people will want to read it,” they said – he knew that it wasn’t great and as far as he could tell, the only people reading the blog were the friends who’d told him to write it – actually, he didn’t even know that for sure because after the first couple of posts, people had ceased to leave comments – he found this very uninspiring – was it really too much to leave a comment and a name after reading? He reminded himself that he was not writing these posts for other people to read – considering that there are over 100 million blogs out there, it’s highly unlikely that someone might happen upon his and begin reading and enjoying it – he also reminded himself that he wrote solely for the pleasure and the discipline of it – in the same spirit that some (insane?) people prepare for and run marathons or play golf or build little airplanes that actually fly – some not very accomplished painters paint because it is sometimes pleasurable to do so – he wondered if those same unaccomplished painters had to make themselves paint even when they didn’t feel like it because if they didn’t paint now (when they didn’t particularly feel like it) they might never paint again – when he’d finally decided to write this blog, he made it a goal to write at least one post every month for a year – he’d thought that this would be easily achievable – he’d even allotted a couple of ten minute slots during week in which work on it – but as is so often the case, he’d ignored the plan and here he was (again) at the end of the month having written nothing – he’d even made a plan for what to write about – he was supposed to be writing about work and how work is really a blessing and fulfillment is a state of mind – he was so full of this sort of bullshit that it oozed from his very pores – he could go on and on about shit like that for hours – a couple of minutes might be inspirational, but he had a unique gift for taking the inspirational and stretching it into the sort of tedium that can typically only be achieved by lines in government agencies – he was thinking about all these things and about how he didn’t feel like writing about work or anything else really and he was looking for a way to cheat – a way to not write, but still meet the monthly goal – it was then that he remembered that a little over a year ago, he had discovered a list of surrealist techniques on Wikipedia and he’d thought it might be fun to try to go through them one by one and try to do verbally what the surrealists had done visually – that’s what he’d thought, but the first one, aerography, had given him some trouble – he’d had no idea how or why a three-dimensional object would be used as a stencil and even less of an idea how he would translate that idea into words – but then he’d started playing around with it – a stencil is just a way of translating the idea of an object onto a page – like a symbol – so what would constitute a three-dimensional way of bringing forth a symbol in words – an idea had occurred to him – the idea was about a man typing about a man typing about a man typing [ad infinitum] – he’d figured that it would either turn out to be mildly clever or completely stupid – it had, in fact, failed to achieve either of those outcomes – it was neither a hit nor a miss – it’d been like one of those darts that gets stuck in the outer frame of the dartboard – it’s not worth anything, but it didn’t miss the board completely – a couple of weeks after he’d written it, he’d been reading The Stinky Cheese Man to his two beautiful daughters when he came across “Jack’s Story” and realized that not only was his little idea not original, but that Jon Scieszka had done it with much more purpose and flair (a bull’s eye, to extend the previous metaphor) – it might have bothered him more except that he really liked Jon Scieszka and the fact that he’d independently thought of something that Jon Scieszka had done made him feel kind of clever after all – after further consideration, however, it occurred to him that both he an Scieszka had probably both come across this little rouse somewhere before (although he could not begin to imagine/remember where or when) and that he should not feel clever about it at all – so he’d stopped feeling clever and he continued to not feel clever and he figured that as long as he did not feel clever, there was no point in trying to be clever – and as long as he did not feel like writing, there was no point in trying to write something from scratch – instead, what he ought to do is borrow the aerography idea and re-use it for the post (it wasn’t doing him any good just sitting in the Word file) – with all this in his mind, he put his fingers on the page and began to type . . ."