reesesWeb

One of the defining characteristics of blogs is that they're exposed privacy. If I'm nancying about in frilly lace panties and garter in my living room, and you espy me through my open curtains, that's a blog. I'm not strutting my stuff down the street, I'm not advertising the location of said living room, in fact, I do what I can to tell you to piss off, and not look at my sausage (big sausage, of course -- the size of your arm, like Sade's Bum Cleaver from 120 Days, without as much of a pronounced bent) falling out the leg of the very-unsupportive ladies' undergarments.

Most blogs are the same way, bent shlongs aside. They're usually vapid, because guilt is felt if one falls behind on updates. Little is sadder than a crappy, boring blog that was updated rigorously for years, then left fallow for six months. Unless crippled kids, anorexic teenage girls, or animals in zoos strike you as sad. So, we fill them in with the events of the day, whether we chronicle our effluent, our lunches, or the stupid thing some stupid person said during something stupid at the stupid place I spend every stupid day.

But they're ours. For us. Your seeing them is a curious comment on your empty voyeurism, not our exhibitionism. Sure, we do things for attention, and we like getting a little attention, but not too much. When we worry, we censor, so our boring lives become even more boring blogs.

However, in the past year or two, blogs have grown this crepuscular corpuscle (ok, I just wanted to write that, it doesn't have to make sense) in the form of comments. Comments are not for the author. They're explicitly for a foreign reader. There's a responsibility incumbent upon someone writing for another person. What they write doesn't have to be interesting, but it should be suitable for some audience. If the best you can come up with is an AOLian "ME TOO", or "uh-huh", or "you got that right!" or worse, mere contribution to an avalanche thereof, you're wasting everyone's time. Correcting someone's erroneous facts is mild edification, pedantic tho it may be, and has some value. (Proactive self-justification? I call it self-awareness, you boor.) Make people laugh, and I'll defend your right to comment. Waste my time, and I'll piss your name into the ice in the bar urinal just to watch it melt.

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