Blogging = Streaking

One of the Catch 22′s of  obscure blogging (aren’t most bloggers obscure ones?) is that you may feel that since only 17 people read your posts on any given day (actually, 113 on Friday; 64 on Saturday; and 47, so far today) you are free to write any old damn thing. Free to be ridiculous or to over-share because, hell, no one’s really paying attention, right? But then, as e-mail scandals demonstrate, everything you write on the Web is hidden in plain sight. It could come back to haunt you, all that over-sharing or venting, all that exertion and postulation. All that earnest prose and stinky fish yanked from the stream of your consciousness, then flopped, half-cooked onto the plate of a blogpost: Here’s a snack! So, it is with cautiousness and trepidation, shot through with the urge to join the exhibitionist party, I’ve recently begun to post regularly. I could flee at any moment, I should tell you, leaving this blog to join the dead ends, ghost towns and 404 File Not Found valentines hosted by ISP’s across  Blogostania. Because, really, is all this time in front of my computer, seated at my backyard picnic table, smoking an 8-5-8 (and hunting down an 8-5-8 Web link on my MacBook) really worth it for you 47 people? Do I even know you?

It’s a little like the streaking craze that swept through America back in the day in the early ’70s. Everyone’s doing it — or enough people are doing it that we keep reading about it. So, feck it all, let’s us do it. My only streaking experience came one night at J.’s house when I was a senior in high school back in Ohio. He’d stolen my girlfriend. Well, if there were a Wikipedia listing on the episode, it might recount that V. left D. for J., possibly because D. had failed to renew his temps and J. had a killer powder-blue convertible. But that would be a disputed interpretation caused by D’s abashed disappointment and inability to drive V. to the Pizza Hut anymore. Much less to make out in the backseat, except in your parent’s driveway, which is never cool. And J. had indisputable charms, not the least being he was tall, handsome and the mayor’s son. In any case, D. got to visit the boudoir, not to mention the bloomers of one of J.’s fading loves a few years hence in college, squaring our dance card. (See what I mean about over-sharing?) (more…)