The cusp of something, or something

A comment to my rant on the media has gotten me thinking about blogging.

I’m pretty much a newcomer to blogging. I tried doing two last summer, just to start, but they were stilted and boring, bordering on pretentious, and fully in the realm of lame. (I refer you to the previous posts on writer's block.)

I continued the two blogs for a couple months each, overlapping each other for a total of three months combined, before I finally gave them the brutal death they deserved.

This bad boy was born in November.

Before that, I didn’t even know anything about blogging, who was doing it, why you’d bother. When I first started hearing about it, it didn’t strike me as interesting. At all.

So you have to understand, I’m fairly surprised that I give a shit about this. But I do. I really enjoy spending a little time whoring my overrated little thoughts out to you people. I’m thrilled I get comments. They entertain me and make me smile.

And now? I get it. I’m starting to see blogging in this, “wow, it’s going to change the world” kind of way.

And I don’t mean in the I-Hug-Trees, Save-The-Whales, Greenpeace kind of way you think. I mean in the arena of thought and information.

Who’s kidding who? It’s fucking awesome to lay down an opinion or express something in a way that gives people pause and then have those same people tell you what you just did for ‘em. You’d have to be Terry Schiavo to not feel that.

[Okay, so that’s crass. Fuck it. I’m leaving it in.]

So I like seeing the number "20" under the Tagish Elvis, but it's all about the content in those comments. Really. The comments are really all that.

Comments are the blogger’s aphrodesiac. We all know it.

We just pretend we’re too cool to care.

More importantly, though: Comments are the spectators way of knowing where the action is. And I don’t mean any spectator. I mean market researchers. Manufacturers. Conglomerates. Policymakers. Anyone who caters to the public--to you. People with the power to change and alter our lives, with the power to give you what you want.

Even if all you want is a pogo stick.

Overheard in Hasbro offices on Monday morning:

“Say, Hal, so I was reading this kid’s blog on Saturday, and he’s waxing nostalgic about the time he found his aunt’s pogo stick and bounced all the way to 7-11. Didn’t you say you were looking for a re-release to slot into the Christmas catalog? We could market it as fun exercise... the kid was talking about how his thighs were burning for two days, but he kept on pogoing... And you know, we could...”

We, the public, have a kind of power we ain't never had before. We're only starting realizing it ourselves...

But They are already catching on.