i'm getting off topic.
point is, i do occasionally read. actually, i read more than you might guess if you met me in person, but less than you'd expect if you met me online. both ways, i don't read often. but sooner than books, i'll read blogs. perhaps because i'm a member of the digital today, or perhaps because i'm invested in the characters writing the blog well before i've started reading. books require chapters to lure you in and blogs get you immediately.
in reading some of my favorites i realized that i most certainly am not a writer. previously, i had only never said i was a writer. but now, now i know i am not a writer.
i wish, one time, i could write a post as wistful and poetic as some of the others i've read. i wish i had something more to offer than "when shit's going down, laugh, cuz poop is funny."
i read one post in which the blogger was trying to wash a spider down the drain of her tub, but couldn't because the struggle she witnessed made her aware that she had never struggled for her life like a spider. again, i'm not a writer: she put it a lot better than i can. the point is, it was amazing. the last time i saw a spider and wrote about it, it was a story about how it was in my kitchen and i swatted it with the spatula and got mad at the squashed spider for causing me to get pasta sauce on the kitchen wall. look, don't flatter me. her story is better.
there's this weird battle, though. the same battle of being a tour guide. a lot of people would ask if there was a secret to getting more tips and there very well may be, but the way you get your tips is only something you can figure out for yourself as it relies on knowing what people think of you. but i would always tell people that the trick was to have one joke for every three facts. the idea behind that formula was that i was being asked for a formula and abstract thoughts were not wanted. that, and it's somewhat true. it doesn't matter how much you know if you're not making an audience laugh and keeping their attention. similarly, it doesn't matter how funny you are if you don't know shit about san francisco. one joke for every three facts. the best is one long fact that happens to be funny enough to feel like a joke but comes with the added amazement that it was not a joke.
so we come to our blogs. i don't even know what a blog is meant to be. a diary? a long real-time story? a rant-page? i have no idea. but after writing on the same blog for a while, you find what you need your blog to be. you discover why you're still writing on it. and, for me, that question returned: how funny do i need to be to keep the attention of an audience, and how much funny will it takes to ultimately ruin the intelligence of a blog?
ultimately, if i were able to reach the perfect balance, i could help a lot of people deal with chaos-- and perhaps even appreciate chaos.
i would love to write something that got someone when they needed it.
once, when i was walking home in san jose i felt like i was going to die. i had a shit day and it was a shit walk. but when i sat down to rest, i saw a car license that said "KP GOING" and i laughed. and kept going. it was precisely timed by the lords of chaos and i'm thankful for it. but i want to write a KP GOING license for someone. some of the other writers i've read have written such brilliant sentences that their stories practically feel like a KP GOING even when i don't need one. it's like an extra-credit push; a 1up. that's amazing because i can't even do it when the audience is desperate and upset. how on earth these other writers do it when i'm already happy is beyond me.
one of these days.
the whole point is this blog is now nearly two years old and i'm unsure if it's done much more than allowed people to live vicariously through my mistakes, or kill time at work. my hope is that somewhere there is someone who made it through a particularly rough struggle because of something i wrote here.
a struggle that was more than constipation.
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