Disintegrating

Photo by Jerome Perelman

Image courtesy of unsplash.com

      I suppose the only place I can reasonably start to look for answers is in my own experience.  I would like to say that my blog hasn’t been abandoned, but instead is perhaps on life support, having only one or two very simple posts in a whole month since the middle of last year, but still having at least one post a month; to be honest this was more or less so that the drop-down menus on the right-hand side of the screen wouldn’t be completely unpopulated at a casual glance.  But to be even more honest, of course, I have had no plans to put anything up here for some time, no new comics, no new stories.

      The essays I feel like were never the biggest draw when it came to finding an audience, with the exception of the illustrated humor essays which were more or less pirating wholesale the style and delivery of other (and of course more popular) blogs than my own, such as The Oatmeal, Hyperbole and a Half, and others.  Which is kind of a shame, only because the essays were the easiest part to write, probably because they required almost no research or hard work, and were only essays in that my mind-transfer to the screen was supposed to be working towards a point -- this is getting off topic.

      If my blog weren’t becoming a derelict (thank goodness for at least that “becoming”), I would have been trying to think of uses I could make of it, or, more importantly, looking forward to working on it again.

      I suppose the idea all along as been to continue developing my voice as a writer, which is only achieved and maintained (so I’m told, and so I in part believe from experience), by practice.  The problem of course is that one can’t just practice writing without having anything to write about; for starters if you don’t know even vaguely what you’re trying to do, you’ll have no idea when you’re managing to make it work or not.  So to have a blog you need it to be about something -- I won’t go into the question of what this blog is about, that problem is unsolvable.

      But thinking about blogging as a thing, and trying to take apart into pieces the actions and reasons involved in bringing it into being, is encouraging, because if there’s something here that’s gone wrong that I can fix, getting a closer look at the work can’t hurt in trying to find it.

      About the only thing resembling an insight that’s occurred to me so far since I began working on this series of posts is that a blog is a tool, just like the computer I’m writing it on, and (more or less) the table and chair the computer and I are resting on while I write.  Tools are, loosely defined, a sort of durable resource that help manipulate other less durable resources; pens and paper manipulate ink, books and the visual cortex manipulate words, hands manipulate all of these but the last (hopefully).

      So by this reasoning a blog is a tool that manipulates -- what?  What is a blog’s raw material?  To a certain extent it depends on the blog -- some are mostly about words, others photos, others family videos, or song files, or mathematical formulas, or sequences of code, or data to be downloaded and used on a 3D printer.

      So our brief foray into amateur analysis leads to the helpful and wonderfully original insight that a blog is powered by their creator's mental contents - experiences, thoughts, emotions.  Surely there has to be a better explanation of why blogs run to a halt than the idea that their creators eventually run out of ideas.