Bloggers do these types of wild things simply because they can. We answer to no one, and no one, in turn, cares at all, ever.
It was time to bring that joke to its obvious conclusion.
But the bigger point I am attempting to encircle with sweaty, stunted arms is that public interest in this blog has really been on the decline.
I blame three things in particular for this. First, I blame everyone but myself, because it's easy.
Second, I blame my inability to do enough "stunt" posts, ones that are carefully crafted to go viral, such as my hilarious coffee antics pictured above, or this mind boggling collage:
At the end of the long, terrible day we call life, though, I blame me. Always having to be the cool, aloof loner type. Keeping the world at an arm's length, making girls wonder what I'm thinking. Except my steady; I drop the mask with her, only for a moment, only while necking.
That is all about to change. I have decided to provide you with a rare glimpse into my cathedral of creativity, my sacrum santorum, my blogging studio.
Well, that's it. Thanks for reading.
Just kidding, there is so much more.
Like these Dreidal crayons I bought one time, for I know not why.
I already said, I KNOW NOT.
I don't feel like doing that.
Stop it. That bothers me.
Look, I'm just trying to get more intimate-
-with my readers-
-so I can't be whatever strange companion you wish me to be right now. I'm stretched thin as it is.
Anyways, to get my creativity going, I require a certain amount of sensory deprivation.
This could be immersion in the lego pool-
or sitting in the Dark Place by this blue machine thingy-
Sure, it gets scary.
But, as Nicholas Sparks put it, you do your best writing when you are in the dark, terrified, and everything around you stinks of cat spray and mildew.
It's true. He wrote the entirety of The Best of Me while locked inside a Doskocil Pet Taxi. His assistant fed him Snausages through the tiny metal holes.
I'm sorry I made that dumb joke. It was because I got out of the lego pool too soon.
Here is the shirt I was wearing when I first met my wife, framed now, no longer meaningful as a garment.
Some kind of strange magic was in the air that night, and it is quite possible that I was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever seen.
Ah, well, you know how marriage goes.
Years later, she confiscated the shirt from my wardrobe when she noticed my chest hair cravat spiking through its frayed surface.
Moving on, any blogger worth a salt has a vast collection of reference materials to turn to in times of need.
The Julia Child blogger from that movie was always looking at cookbooks, and I happen to know that the mighty Jenny Lawson herself is never a stone's throw from her dog-eared copy of Dr.Johnson's Shake Your Pithy Jowls.
Here is just a taste of my own blogging reference library:
There's one other book in the collection, too. I couldn't find it for the picture though.
Probably my wife did something with it. She's always ganking my tomes.
After my senses have been well and truly deprivated, I whiteboard a few key concepts in dreidal.
Well, it's an oversimplification, but okay, we'll get the ball rolling with it.
Anyone else?
Good, good; let's expand that to something more universal though.
Now, how about we drill down to some specifically applicable implementations?
Hmmm. I guess my hesitation there would be that it's kind of a juvenile, maybe kind of a tired, approach to the material?
As you can imagine, blogging is terrifically hard on the emotions. You have to keep yourself balanced by staring at things for long periods of time.
I like to alternate between gazing at my Happy Shelf-
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Each one has a story, and each is perfect in its way |
-and my Life is Disappointment Shelf:
This is the part of my blogging studio that my wife calls "a big problem".
There are a lot more areas to the studio, but they all kind of look like the "big problem."
And when all is said, written, drawn, and yet another post has leapt from the snapping electric line of my teeming brain, I put all my blogging tools carefully away.
They wait for me, in the closet there, like a pantheon of slumbering gods.
I hope you appreciate how hard it was for me to open up to you all like this.
As always, thanks for reading.