Letter Never Sent

I think I must be experiencing a period of regression. I’m on my own again since having broken up with K. after having lived together for nearly seven years. And now I feel in some ways like I’m 18 again. I spend a lot of time alone, and I think being alone and lonely reminds me what it was like when I was just out of high school. It’s not an altogether bad thing. In some ways I actually enjoy experiencing loneliness. It makes me feel like I have so much left to learn about myself. It’s that or I’m just a masochist.

I’ve discovered I have a new neighbor. He’s a gecko who makes a living snatching insects mucking about my porchlight. For some reason, most of my neighbors don’t turn on their lights at night so he’s found a nice little place to live. Every time I come outside at night he runs back into a gap in the window framing to hide until I’m gone. I can just make out a side view of him with his lidless eye staring at me. He must be doing okay since he appears to be pretty big and fat. One day I will try to capture a picture of him. I tried just now (2:30am) and I’m sure if any of my neighbors saw me they must be wondering what the heck I was doing.

When I watch Washington Journal, the call-in show on CSPAN, I feel better about Americans and humanity in general. It’s so nice to hear real, honest people given time to talk about important news. It doesn’t happen enough.

Webcam is back up. Website just came back up. Car seems to be running. I’m being productive today!

After a month of problems my frankenstein computer, my main man, Gordon, is back up and running. I had to wait until I could afford a replacement motherboard for him, and have been using his slower, less helpful brothers until I could perform the necessary surgery on him. As soon as I get everything reorganized I’ll be able to do the webcam and a few other things again as well as work on my 3d modeling homework AT home!

Man, Bush is such a dipshit. God must have a real good sense of humor albeit a very sick and twisted sense of humor.

A very good friend of mine has started a blog and I think it’s really great. We were penpals for a long time many moons ago and it’s nice to see her voice in print again. I always admired her way of writing.

• Uptighty.com

I always enjoy reading about banned license plates. It’s amazing how most of the complaints come from cops with nothing better to do than plop their butt down and write a letter to the DMV. Have we turned into a tattle-tale society? I mean, how can you have a serious problem with a license plate that reads: “OUTRUNM”? Not only is it not obvious that the message is directed to anyone in particular, but it’s even pretty damn funny. Another one that a Wisconsin Sgt. took offense to was ‘HODAWG’. He alleges it has something to with prostitutes and gang-bangers. It reminds me when I was a kid and I would joke around with my cousins and call each other ‘homes’ as in homeboy. After a while my uncle took me aside and very ernestly explained that since ‘homes’ was short for homosexual that he didn’t think I should be saying it. I’ve laughed about that several times. Of course, this is coming from the same guy who wouldn’t let his kids watch the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because the show involved the ‘magic’ which is satanic.

• The Smoking Gun: Blue License Plate Special
• The best license plate of them all! [img]

Did you ever make a zine? You know, those stapled xeroxed compilations of drawings, photos, comics, and journal-style entries you might find at your local record shop or book store. I started out in high school and got into producing zines by way of comics. I wanted to make my own comic book and since hiring a printer wasn’t realistic doing something on a small-scale made more sense. I had no idea that it was such a widespread phenomenom, but back in the early nineties zines were everywhere.

Blogs have a lot in common with zines as far as I can tell. They function in a lot of the same ways. Both blogs and zines are a way to speak to complete strangers in a mediated way. It is simutaneously personal and impersonal. It is often more of a one way conversation, a monologue. They both allow their creators to declare a small amount individuality. When you write a blog or a zine you are saying “I have something I want to say.” Many people just want recognition or attention. In this way blogging exhibits the more annoying characteristics of the zine world. It can be amazingly cliquish, banal, and shallow. Not completely unlike high-school.

Take some of the blogging world’s most notable luminaries. These are the people you might see in an article on blogging. People like Jason Kottke of kottke.org or Glenn Reynolds from Instapundit.com. I don’t know why they’re luminaries, but start reading blogs and you’ll see their names. Predictably, since most journalists are susceptible to fads we’ve seen a lot of articles on blogging and a lot of name-dropping by journalists of the same small group of people. Regardless of what anyone in the media or in the blogging world says, blogs as they stand today are not a threat to classic journalism. I would say roughly 10-20% of blogs are worth reading on a daily basis. For one thing, many bloggers won’t research a subject if it requires leaving the house. This makes it difficult to gather real reporting or news. Secondly, there is no pretense to objectivity when blogging. Even when someone does try to be objective it is usually a calculated move to add the trappings of reason and sensibility to their opinions. I could just be overly cynical.

The main problem with many blogs is that they’re incredibly boring. A few really good ones are not….for some reason I’ve really been enjoying the sewing blog by Mena Trott of MT Fame. Sewwrong provides I guess my main problem is that I see blogging as something having so much potential for change, much of it unrealized. Maybe as more and more people gain awareness of it some good collaborative efforts may be born.