Blogs, like diseases, can infect anyone. This is partially owed to their upside; many different strains offer various opinions and perspectives ranging from a broad cross-section of society. However democratic, while some diseases leave you with antibodies to fight future attacks, blogs prefer to weaken the author with each crippling entry, making them less and less likely to chose other public means of demonstrating personal emotions, feelings, thoughts, opinions, etc.
Take me, for instance.
Within the public sphere, a person may choose to eject what's hidden inside, flinging out into the commune for others to prance upon. They may do this for many reasons: a cry for help ("Look what's happening to me.."), self-importance ("Look what I did!"), paternalistic altruism ("Just so you know..."), Tourette's ("FUCK! I mean, sorry.."), or any number of nuanced, complicated reasons going towards the development of a social identity as distinct from the faceless masses.
But this choice must not be overlooked. It must not be taken for granted because there exists a myriad other means of expressing emotion or manifesting thoughts (apart from Tourette's, of course, in which choice is compromised). Diaries, journals, painting, writing stories, composing songs, poetry: all of these are examples of an individual's private search for meaning in their life. So why must one blog publicly? Are there unique benefits attached to each of the above reasons or is there one foundational good achieved by spilling your secrets to the world?
Although it might personally reward one's curiosity or fulfill one's entertainment quota, exploring the ulterior motives of other bloggers is not my chief objective. In fact, I claim, albeit falsely, 100% apathy towards their intentions. This blog will not be about other peoples' blogs. This blog won't make reference to other blogs. This blog will be 100% the musings of my mind.
And now, to turn the analytical lens of perception on myself. Why am I doing this? If I liken blogs to disease, why contract one willingly?
Well, like disease, blogs come in all shapes and sizes, a plethora of different symptoms accompanied by a wide spectrum of magnanimity. This blog, I will liken to alcoholism. It is non-communicable, highly influenced by behavior and emotion, and more than likely, genetics.
This blog will not make you itch in unspeakable locations, nor will it leave you bed-ridden hacking up pieces of your lungs, nor will it cause you to hallucinate (unless you drop acid because the format of the blog is conducive to such activity, in which case, "see you on the other side, brother.") and have cold sweats.
This blog will be sporadically linked to me "falling off the wagon", or otherwise consistently following bouts of taking triple shots of whatever emotions dug up in me by the gravediggers of my soul (gothic almost, right? Cha-ching).
And finally, since my great-grandfather, Joseph Daniel Harrington was once an esteemed columnist for a now defunct Boston paper, I guess the blog is genetic too (minus the whole getting paid $.010 a column, which would be nice actually). I am predisposed to publicly displaying my thoughts, just as I am alcoholism, which plays nicely out with my Irish disease metaphor.
But enough about plagues and blogs (blagues?). Now let's get to the one question I'm sure everyone was really asking themselves: Who the fuck is Josh Beckett and what does CG mean?
The short of it is that Josh Beckett is currently the ace starting pitcher on the Boston Red Sox staff. CG stands for "complete game," which means that a pitcher begins the game by throwing out the first pitch to the first batter, and concludes the game by recording the final (27th, if the game does not go to extra-innings) out.
The longer part is that I've noticed that every blog has some sort of random and unique quality to it. Sometimes, each entry will be titled according to a momentous event that the author wishes to remember in the future. Oftentimes the entry title will briefly reference this event so that at first glance, the memory of the day will come hurriedly rushing back to the author in a wild blur or colors, people, and sensual imagery. All of the time, however, the title will have to do with something that resounds deeply within the author.
I'm a self-proclaimed Boston Red Sox fan. Many in my life have pointed out to me that this is also a disease, but instead of likening it to a blog, I liken it to religion. My temple is MLB.TV and I worship my deity nearly every day, around 3 hours each day. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, organized religion--or is that a vice?
I have faith in my 40 man roster and I will stand by them for all eternity, and in exchange for my faith I will be rewarded (twice already in my lifetime, thank you very much). And if likening heavenly afterlife to the champagne showers of a locker room deep in the belly of a baseball church, if flinging $8 beers and cracked peanut shells into the wispy air in ecstatic rapture and exchanging sloppy but spiritual high-fives with complete strangers is blasphemous, then Beelzebub here I come, because there's nothing quite like a World Series Championship.
But, I digress. What I mean to say is that the Red Sox are as important to me as anything in this world. Therefore, simply titling my blog entries with memorable events of the day's Red Sox game will suffice in stirring awake my slumbering memory, deep in its Red Sox reverie of future victories and baseball conquests.
A caveat: this blog will not exclusively focus on the Boston Red Sox; however, it will devote a sub-section of every entry to the day's game, unless there is no game, in which I'll still have a section filled with Red Sox musings. It'll be found toward the bottom of each entry and it will be formatted in such a way to set it off from all the rest, so if you care little-to-nothing about baseball generally or the Red Sox specifically, then you can afford to skip it.
As this is but a sad pilot episode, a droning preface to the denouement of my extro/introverted critical observations, I will conclude by writing that should you feel bored or otherwise tired of my writing mannerisms, by all means say so, and I'll gladly glance over them, finish my glass of Jameson, and cry. For I know the tragedy of the blog is such that we are all so warm and coddled in our own lives that what you or I have to say about this mired world of ours matters very little for the rest. Socrates once said that wisdom is measured by our awareness of our own ignorance. I say, "who's Socrates?"
No comments:
Post a Comment