Blogger Beware

Those who blog -- as well as many who don’t -- will know that the blogger has a feature available to him wherein he may append various “tags” -- non-hierarchical keywords or terms -- to an entry he has written. Once associated with a particular entry, these tags go into the bottomless pit of the Google database where they wait to be nudged by a user of the search engine, at which point they wake up and convey the user back to the blog.

Let us say that you are writing about Hinduism in Bali. Upon finishing your entry you might add tag words such as “Bali,” “Hinduism,” and “religion,” providing each word as a general guide. It’s really a pretty nifty way of facilitating the web surfer/researcher, streamlining and focusing, cutting corners which would otherwise encumber. Tags may even lead you around lengthy introductions such as this one, or at least save you from getting lodged on a sandbar you had not intended to visit in the first place.

In addition, many bloggers utilize a web tracking program. This allows the blogger to see how many “hits” his blog has received, and where these visits came from. (If you thought you were perfectly anonymous, think again).

Looking recently at the data on my web tracker, I discovered that my blog entry on “sex with cows” (which concerned a Balinese man caught in the act of sexual intercourse with a cow) had placed #5 on the record of Google visits for entries so tagged.

I was surprised, to say the least. Who knew that cow sex would be a subject of such keen interest? Moreover, I felt proud. Surely placing #5 put me toward the top of the bottomless pit, and should therefore be a rare achievement and testimony to my gifts as a writer.

However . . . well, clearly a sober man is inclined to wonder, after the initial glow of fame fades away, how many blog entries, worldwide, there can have been on sex with cows. Perhaps five? Which of course would put mine dead last.

Then again, perhaps I had been merely unaware of a lively interest out there in sex with cows. I began to imagine hundreds, maybe thousands of sleepless men, sitting alone in darkened rooms, laptops open, screens ablaze with graphic, unsettling images of unclothed cows in all manner of position and pose.

One visitor from Pakistan hit this entry in my blog thirty-seven times. In a row. I make no personal judgment either of the man or of Pakistan, but merely mention the occurrence.

Another of my blog entries that has done well, as a Google destination anyway, is one entitled “Mean Spirited Women” (and tagged the same). This placed as high at one point as #1 in Google. Honestly, the actual content of this blog entry does not warrant the attention. It was simply something had I dashed off some three years ago when I happened to be angry at my wife. I wrote, therefore, that she was a mean-spirited woman, and philosophized that most women are.

Of course it’s not true. She is in fact a sweetheart, and t’was I who was in the wrong. Okay, honey?

Nonetheless, what shall we conclude from these statistics? How has it happened that so many people have typed in the words “mean spirited women”? Or can there be a fetish at play here as well?

Wanted: Attractive female

Age: Negotiable

Must be mean spirited

In any case, I merely pose the question, and will allow the reader to draw his own conclusions.

Lastly, I’d like to say something about the “comments” I receive. Entries in my blog have often been associated with multiple sclerosis (which is a disease that I have -- or had, at least, until it was flash-baked out of me by the searing, laser-like Balinese sun). Subjects addressed included such topics as brain damage, neural deterioration, profound fatigue, cognitive difficulties, and so on. They have not been wildly popular entries, where the Google database is concerned, but they have attracted an astounding amount of spam. A good deal of this spam has been of a sexual nature, advertising everything from cheap Viagra to hot Russian blondes. What one has to wonder is whether there is something about MS that has aroused the spammer, or has he been somehow inspired to believe that this sort of thing arouses the MS sufferer in particular?

Frankly, I find it discouraging, and an insult to my efforts and good intentions. But what are you going to do? It’s a sick world, folks. If you want to know more on the subject, just start a blog.

Fishing

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. --1 Cor 13:12

I suppose that blogging is at least on some level a cry for attention. It is a will to dialogue, a will to share and to receive. It may even sometimes be a cry for help. It is certainly an avenue forged for the sake of connection--first of all with oneself, and then with others.

We go through life hardly knowing what to think of ourselves--how do I really feel, what do I really believe? Sometimes what we do becomes sufficient in itself to define. I am a computer programmer and I like bicycle racing. I am banker and I am active in various social causes. I am a husband and a father.

What about the rest? What about this scary mess of conflicting inclinations, multiple choice meanings; this struggle of opposites, this constant continental shift of who we are and who we want to be, what we think and what we know, how we feel and how we are caused to feel. Any man but touched by the feather of the unknown must fall, and begin again.

One's viewpoint, one's character, one's faith is very often no more than a passing product of the moment. The passion of thought causes us to speak of the part and not the whole. We end therefore in communicating prejudice rather than compassion, and we live and are perceived according to the incompleteness not only of what we have been able to express, but what we have failed to express, not to mention what we ourselves do not yet know.

A thousand words are expended toward describing what is otherwise clear in one beat of the heart. Language finds itself fishing for meaning and completeness like a child with a stick and a string--who moreover did not care to touch the worm.

Not a Blob, But a Trout

Well this morning my laptop refuses to connect to the Internet, or perhaps the Internet is refusing to connect to my laptop. In either case, this may mean that I am not meant to write anything.

I, however, am seeking to frustrate destiny by typing in Word with the intent to later revisit the Internet, and thus my blog, when cyberspace is in a better mood, and post at that time.

I wonder if this is irreverent—or worse yet, a direct disobedience?

Oh well, never mind. Inventiveness is man's unavoidable curse.

I am thinking again about the mysterious blob near the beginning of time; or rather, I was thinking about it last night before I fell asleep. It is the last thing I remember, that blob. I did not, however, dream of the blob, but dreamed of catching an enormous fish and pulling it to the shore—a fish as large as my Labrador. I was showing the fish to some children and petting it as if it were a Labrador; and I was wondering whether to kill the fish and keep it, or release it back to the water.

The way one usually kills a fish—a trout, anyway—is by inserting ones thumb in its mouth and snapping the head back, thus breaking the neck. But in the case of this very large fish, it was clear that this method would be unfeasible.

Should I shoot the fish then? But of course I had no gun.

Even were I to somehow manage to kill the fish, how would I carry it back home to the frying pan? It was certainly not going to fit in my fishing bag, any more than my Labrador would. How then to get the fish home? And where to find a frying pan nearly as big as the kitchen itself?

Now what was the meaning of this dream—a very real dream, a very vivid dream, and yet distant and obscure, perplexing, not to mention ridiculous.

And so maybe I dreamed of the mysterious blob after all. What to make of the thing? How to contain it? How to comprehend it? How to digest it?

All I know is that I woke up with my arm around the dog, patting his stomach, wondering how he had gotten there, sleeping next to me like a spoon, and why it had occurred to him that I might appreciate it.

The Lost Post

Well folks, you're just going to have to take my word for it . . . earlier this morning I wrote a post of absolute genius and beauty, eloquence and wisdom, a post to end all posts, the mother of all posts . . . It was about God and life and destiny and meaning . . . but it disappeared before I was able to save and publish.

I'm blaming this on the computer. I need a new laptop. I am blaming this on the failure of laptops to perform as well as a pencil and paper. I am blaming it on MS, because I have no idea what happened to the post or where it went. I only know that my wonderful bit of wisdom for the day is gone forever. And because of MS there exists nary the smallest word of the thing any longer in my mind.

All I can ask is that you just try to imagine it. And enjoy.

To Blog Or Not To Blog?

Blogging seems to be a fairly lonely sort of business. One is alone with his thoughts, as is the case 99 percent of the time anyway in life, and the only difference here is that he is for some reason writing them down. Why? So that he can be clear about what he himself is thinking?

No, I don't believe so.

Why write then? Why blog?

One suspects that an audience is either anticipated or imagined. Perhaps it is someone loved. Perhaps someone lost. Perhaps it is a group of like-minded friends. Perhaps it is a group having something in common. Like MS, for instance.

Perhaps we simply want to speak, and to hear a voice in return. Society seems to become less and less a community, more and more a scattering of isolated fragments, buck shot, trying to remember not only what barrel they came out of, but what the original target had been.

We set our fingers to the keyboard, we direct our thoughts into hyperspace. We say, essentially, Is anyone there?

And we wait. And we listen very closely. And we think anew.

There are observatories devoted to listening to space. There are devices that listen to the nearest star, to the nearest galaxy, to the asteroid belt and the rings of Saturn, and to planets and solar systems that are no more than theory.

And what is the answer, what sound does it make?

It is the sound of one hand clapping, I suppose.

You Too Can Be a Master Blogger

So here we are—up and running for about a week now, right? I’m a blogger. I blog. I think along bloggish lines and I often feel rather bloggy, especially in the morning. I have a blogover, which is preferable to the hangovers I used to subscribe to.

Sadly, though, it seems that people seldom leave comments. I wonder why? Could it be because I’m so damn blogging, I mean boring? Oh well, I can’t keep it a secret forever. People are bound to find out.

Today I went to the dentist, and the only thing that hurt afterwards was my entire body. Not my teeth. I don’t know if there is an official medical term for this, but I’ll just call it turning to stone syndrome. If I try to lie prone for any significant amount of time my muscles tend to freeze in that fashion. When called upon to resume movement they object and cry out in disbelief.

I feel like the easiest, least painful way to get back to my feet would be for someone to stand by with a giant spatula and kind of flip me upright; but of course this method, particularly within the space available in the dentist’s cramped examination room, would be less than practicable, not to mention embarrassing.

But at home, when getting out of bed for instance, it works. I just drop and roll. This, I know, is what the experts advise in the event that one finds himself on fire, but I can confidently attest that it works just as well for MS. Moreover, if I ever do find myself aflame, I will already be well practiced in self-extinguishment. This is but another of the many beneficial things one learns from having MS.

These are the fringe benefits of our disease, the silver linings, the tidbits tucked into the small print.

Riiight.

But to return to blogging—I find that my pages have been downloaded not only in the US, but in Scotland, and in Canada, and in Turkey! Now that’s what I call exotic. I find myself eagerly anticipating a hit from Fiji, or Kuwait, or the Himalayas. I am suddenly a citizen of the world. In my own mind, anyway.

Seriously though, I do believe that each connection, each communal gesture is precious. Here is a greeting from an MS sufferer, and here a nod from a brother, a sister, a fellow member of the human race.

God bless us, everyone.

Blog for a Brain

I am an idiot. I freely admit to it. In fact, I insist that this be recognized from the outset by anyone finding himself in a position to evaluate my person. How much of this idiocy is the fault of demyelination in my brain and how much of it preexisted MS I am not sure. I prefer to lay the entire blame on MS. Simplify, simplify, simplify, as Thoreau said.

All day long I've been struggling to create a blog--nothing fancy, mind you--just a basic blogspot blog. The first thing I did was to ask a friend how to send a link to my wonderful new blog--you know, the kind you can click on for transport directly to the site. My friend, a beautiful young woman with a brain the size of Louisiana, typed down the necessary HTML symbols for me, and between the symbols wrote http://www.your-website-address-here/.

This is exactly what I copied and pasted in a post announcing my new website.

I present this as Exhibit A, a comprehensive proof of my idiocy.

Two days in a row now I planned a backed potato and ham dinner, yet neglected the baking part where the potatoes are concerned.

This is why they make frozen pizzas and pancakes in a box. For people like me.

Gimme a minute to catch my breath. It is a sentiment that is becoming ever more familiar. If only EVERYTHING and EVERYONE would slow down a tad bit, I'll regain my feet, catch up with the pack, get back in sync. Hold on a sec. I've hit a bit of a wall here (the Wall of China).

Yet the race goes on, run by those who are able. I stagger back into the lane, imagining that I can still see a faint trace of the dust from the long gone feet of the last runner.

I know this. It's right on the tip of my tongue. I can do this. Just one more minute to rest.

Blogging for Dummies with Multiple Sclerosis

What does one do when he is technology challenged to begin with, and then also has multiple sclerosis? He purchases every Dummy book he can get his hands on--in this case, Blogging for Dummies. The end result is a rather dumb looking blog, which either is or is not better than nothing.

A blog, as I am told, is a platform. It is not made of wood, but of words. Herein the author shows himself to be a person of talent and interest to those in high places, garnering the rewards of recognition and forging for himself the next best thing to actual credentials, banking on the notion that one can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time.

It occurs to me (as an aside) that these Dummy books, already so popular, could find a greatly expanded market among those of us with MS. Walking in a Straight Line for People with MS, for instance. Thinking Straight for People with MS. The Dummy's with MS Guide to Remembering the Simplest Things on Earth. And so forth.

Space, the final frontier. The blogosphere. Enter at your own risk. And so I add my voice to the bewildering din.