My Fair Blog

Not all of my posts need to be so serious, yeah? Though as I find myself updating this blog on fewer and fewer occasions, I suppose I want to make my small contribution as mentally lucrative as possible; that is why I stick with the pregnant weightiness of philosophy. There was a time when this blog, now going on its 2.5 year mark, was a broader project -- or maybe aimless is more appropriate. I wanted to do something as a midway point between philosophy, social commentary, creative writing and comedy; basically a cathartic melting pot of ideas at a time when the semblance of indefinite school had finally shattered. This blog was born out of a minor crisis in my life; I had been trained towards scholarship, but with only a BA, I am stillborn with a society that offers zero opportunities to continue an academic life without going on to a graduate school. I needed to do something, and with no money and the networking skills slightly below the great apes, I was isolated. Hmm, the internet and its midwife: desperation.

Why not take a moment to take stock of what exactly all this nonsense is about? As things go, the blog evolved on its own more to the pressures of my own life and interest in this endeavor than to any real evolutions that took place on the blog. Mimicking aspects of my real life, it too is stillborn in many ways. Any goal or plan, any hope for even the smallest audience, was long ago abandoned and not too far from when it started. It took on more of the role of intellectual dumping ground rather than anything that could be considered a whole or a piece moving towards some goal or serving some function. And to be completely honest, I'm not sure I even ever envisioned a blog like that.

Much of my traffic is from google image search because I "borrowed" some pictures of famous buildings for a post about Brutalist architecture. They come and go as anybody does using an image search. I often wonder what their initial response is to my blog in the context of what they're looking for. I suspect a mixture of fatigue and horror when they hit the walls of white text that are observable from space.

This blog in all honesty really is just one of the archetypal guilty pleasures of our generation. It's a bit of journal keeping, letter writing and the nasty shit you spew against your enemies that typically, before the internet and the widespread use of personal media, wouldn't have left the bedroom, basement or cave. Everybody who writes, whether privately or publicly, writes with the secret desire that it will be read by somebody other than yourself. Technology has taken the virtual reality of desire and turned it into something that can be reflexive; now the imagination feeds into the machine that orchestrates an experience that can be felt by our senses. Why is so much of the internet pornography? With a click the desire is fulfilled, brought into reality before you. With the blog post, so too goes the same process, with the secret desire for your writing to be read being fed immediately. And with such decadence and hedonism, what kind of disease might grow? I often think about what kind of posthumous material will be uncovered for our generation while I read letters scrawled by the insane Nietzsche kept by his friends in the late 19th century. What simple technologies to immortalize what maybe we would have wanted dashed from our personhood. I am nauseated to think about what prolific writers might have their facebook at the age of 18 dug up, brought into their legacy.