Snippets #3: on narcissism...

the thought occurred to me as i walked through the rain this evening, my worn old boots clumping on the pavement, that blogging has to be one of the most narcissistic endeavours accessible to the average citizen in the current milieu. it goes beyond the basic greed, pride and vanity that you used to see on the streets and pubs and clubs when you decided to head out on the town. it's a quiet whimper expressed by the hopeless and condemned, a desperate need for recognition, a misguided belief that there are people out there who truly love them for the delicate, utterly (banal) unique (mass-produced, Macdonalds-engorged) snowflake they are and want to know what they had for lunch today, what music they're currently ignoring and what their goals and aspirations are for the weekend. it's the one thing i can think of which out-ranks Selection Criteria writing in terms of pure self-serving self-indulgence.

and it's addictive. it's the safe scream into the abyss for people who are too terrified to leave the sanctity of their troglodytic minds and realise their own insignificance. it's easy - you can do it from your bedroom, your office, your fucking car when you're stopped at the lights if you can comprehend it. it's for people who don't realise that the rest of the world cares as little for them as they do for the lad serving their dinner who studied for his Bachelor of Commerce at the University of Bangkok and now works as a barman and cook at the local chinese restaurant because no fucker will give him a better job in this country (even though his english is almost as good as theirs), not that he cares much since he earns a better wage doing that in Sydney than he would as an accountant in Thailand... but i digress. it's as accessible as typing "blogging site" into google, waving your finger blindly at the screen and picking whatever it lands on. you can set one up in under 5 minutes and get stuck straight into what a whore the checkout bitch at the supermarket was who kept staring at your boyfriend's nipple piercings and I'M SO FUCKING SPECIAL BECAUSE MARYLIN MANSON'S "ANTICHRIST SUPERSTAR" MAKES ME FEEL THAT WAY AND ANYWAY I LOVE HIM SOO MUCK AND I WANTS TO HAVE HIS BABNIES!1!

and before you start screaming "hypocrite", i'd like to give you a travel brochure for a wonderful holiday destination called Hell. i suggest you go there. i was as bad as the rest of them, back in the day. i had a blog back before Live Journal was famous and by the time i finally lost the spark i'd written a small book's worth of words (over 260,000), freely accessible to young and old. i had a look through a few pages of what i produced a couple of months ago and i was surprised - partly because it reminded me of some of the insignificant events that occurred and how they effected me at the time, as well as how fucking horrible my prose was.

and the only reason i'm back is because a nice lady asked me to. i could have written emails and spammed them out to a mailing list, but the request was to "start a new blog" and so... well, she asked politely and i'm loathe to refuse a reasonable polite request like that. it may amuse you to know that i don't actually get any readership statistics from this site. i turned off all the options which would make my site come up on google or any google-related aggregators. i can't prevent yahoo from finding it, but i guess you can't win them all. i assume that there are people who read it because every now and then i get a comment from someone saying as much. i'm not sure whether i'd stop now that i'm started again. certainly, if i knew for sure that no one was reading i'd take it offline. i'd be able to write more freely, for a start, and not have to filter the content so that people don't get upset when i give them a serve.

that all said, i AM glad that i've been given the impetus to start writing again though. i used to enjoy it and i need the practice. i just wish it didn't make me One Of Them, that's all...