Our Dumb Blog

Now that I have blogging software installed, I have this fiendish urge to make nothing but bloggish posts. That is: things that no one else could possibly want to read. These take a couple of forms.

One of them mimics the Seinfeldish comic routine wherein the comedian says, “Have you ever noticed…” then points out some inanity of daily life which in and of itself has no comic value. But the comedian is certain this his particular blabbering about this observation will be funny.

Bloggers do this, but rather than anything remotely comic, there’s just a strange vacuum.

For example, here is a bloggish post I thought about posting. But (un)fortunately for you I (almost) had the ability not to post:

Have you ever thought about chocolate syrup bottles? Is there some reason they have TWO caps? Is the first one not good enough? And if not, then why is the second one worthless? It seems as though this entire system exists solely to create muck on the inside of the second cap. Which is good, right, because you get the muck on the cap and not your hands when you close the bottle. But no, then you have to open the bottle again, and get your fingers mucky in the process. Maybe the outside cap should just be thrown away. Surely someone can invent a much better way to dispense chocolate syrup. A method that won’t leave my neurotic tendencies eagerly awaiting a new bottle just so it will be clean even when the old one is still half full.

See. You really were better off not reading that. And not because it was spectacularily horrific. But because it leaves you in this stupendous vacuum that sucks. And keeps sucking you back for more, for some strange reason.

There’s also the sort of endless meta-posts about writing and other posts and such. This, in fact is a meta-meta-post about posts about– oh forget it.

(e.g. I should note that I’ve been using the words spectacularly and stupendously with spectacular frequency lately. I’m not sure why. It needs to stop.)

In any case, I’m sorry. I’m not sure what’s come over me. It’s probably just a phase I’m going through and you won’t have to live with it much longer. It does, at least, encourage me to write. Which I need to do. Because I suck. And I must get better. (And you, dear reader, must cope in the meantime.)

A few hours ago, Joanna caused my MP3 player to stray from its usual random-order playback and instead play Pink Floyd. This was good. Joanna and I both simultaneously noticed and admired the line, “come on you target of far away laughter.” This was odd, since neither of us had previously paid any attention or consciously processed this line in nearly ten years of listening to this song. It’s only got a dozen lines, which for a 12 minute song is a very low lyrics:length ratio. such a ratio is accomplished by either playing lots of instrumental stuff with occaisional lyrical intervention (e.g. Floyd) or by simply taking 9 minutes to sing a 3 minute song (e.g. Low).

A few minutes ago, I noticed with some consternation that my MP3 player was producing rather unpleasant noise. What was unusual about this was that it had been doing so for quite some time. Often it plays a song I don’t like or am not in the mood for, but it’s just a song and then it moves on to the next song. It has 5,500 songs to chose from. Sadly, many of them are songs I once liked but don’t like any more, or songs that I thought I might grow to like but instead grew to hate. Or, more frequently, songs I like sometimes, but never when XMMS decides to play them. The platters are okay. In that 1950’s way. A song every year or two is enough to keep my sphere large enough. Eight songs in a row is enough to make me murderous.

At this point I realized that after playing Pink Floyd, which was cool, XMMS progressed to playing the Pixies which is cool too. And then the Platters. Which are a lot of things, but not cool. Fortunately for me and any potential victims, I found the random button again.

After so much time trying to get as many MP3’s as possible, I’m working on culling them. I moved several things that I couldn’t bring myself to actually delete which I moved to a separate place so they wouldn’t get played inadvertently. Like Sting. Sting is thrust upon me in enough grocery stores and the like, that I really don’t need to intentionally play sting, ever, in order to hear much more than I ever need to. In fact, I’ve probably heard enough sting for my entire life.

I’m sending out an SOS…