Pissing in the Stream of Consciousness

And so it begins anew. Except it's not really new, and it's not beginning. Forever, since before the word "blog" even existed, back in the days of slashdot and kuro5hin, I've excreted more blogs -- Not blog posts, mind you, but individual blogs -- than I can count. A chronic serial blogger, I would start one, make one or two inconsequential posts, then, spent from the sisyphean effort of self-expression in a medium that seems hewn from a solid block of undifferentiated navel-gazing, I would slouch off into the dark, sunless oort cloud at the periphery of the blog-o-verse, or blogger-system, or blog-space, or whatever meaningless term is most recently employed, to mull and think, and prepare my next post, thoughts skating across the empty ocean of my mind with the speed of continental drift.

The word "blog" itself is distasteful to me on an almost instinctual level. The onomatopoeia of "blog" suggests some regurgitative therapy, perhaps as the culmination of an evening spent doing things one will regret the next day. The parallels here are obvious. One: vomiting. To observe a small sample of available "blogs" is to assault the sensorium with the sour odor of pre-digested content. Ideas once teeming with nutritional value now lay curdled and bubbling before you, full of all the promise of a pavement pizza after an evening of serious drinking (that is to say: none at all).

And really, mostly, at least for me, and as with most things in life, with the possible exception of run-on sentences, blogging involves regret. "I wish I hadn't written that", I will say, or "I wish I had written that witty thing before this other dude wrote it", or "I wish I hadn't plagiarized that one girl whose blog, it turns out, is much more widely read than I had anticipated".

So why the hell am I blogging, one might ask, and to such a one, to whom I would normally thumb my nose, or bite my thumb, or hoot derisively, or whatever it is the kids are doing these days, I will instead extend the temporary grace of my ephemeral and fleeting good humor, and respond "It's all her fault."

An ex-co-worker (the grammatically astute among you are welcome to silently criticize the over-use-of-hyphens), the poet pugilist has ever been an inspiration to me. Braver, kinder, smarter, funnier, more earnest, more cheerful, more honest, more deserving-of-unconditional-praise a person you can never hope to find. In the words of John the Baptist, I am not worthy to loose the thong upon her sandals. Her blog is the rare exception to the rule, the subtle edelweiss that blooms in the shade of that mountain of shit that is the blog-mass. She rises above the blogger lumpenproletariat, and makes me want to be a better person.

...But perhaps I gush.

Superlatives aside, Leila really is a brick of a gal (the first in a series of intriguing and charming characters who pass, underappreciated, through my life, and to whom I hope to introduce you in the course of this intermittent verbal diarrhea), for whom I must confess a slight hero-worship.

She blogs, and therefore must I blog. Blogito ergo sum. I will not, however, I refuse, to use those goddamn e.e. cummings headlines. Ew.

As an aside, and on the subject of Descartes, one finds philosophical depth in the strangest of places...

It is verbose, it is pretentious, it will use big, unnecessary words and complicated grammar, and at times there will be cussing. It will be a journey from unpolished pretension and blatant sesquipedalianism to a hopefully more streamlined, hemingwayesque paradigm.

Paradigm, by the way, is another word that makes me want to vomit. I am comforted by the thought that I'm not alone in this.

So desu ka? To the title of this little literary turd: "Nacho Niche". It's really a reference to my current work environment, in the context of which I am regularly exposed to many pearls of marketing wisdom involving "niches", "long tails", and "the box" (getting outside it, getting back in it, throwing it out, decorating it, maybe adding some nice plants, etc.), combined with an extremely childish (and possibly racially insensitive) joke, the punchline to which is "That's Nacho Cheese! That's Nacho Cheese!".

So yeah, this ain't my niche. I don't blog. And when I do it's fucking unreadable, but if you've made it this far, next post will be better, I promise.

Tomorrow: A poem! My first poem in twenty years! Of questionable nutritional value, but delicious nonetheless. The McDonald's of poetry. Empty calories for all!

(See what I did there? I dangled the enticing "carrot", a promise of improvement, then whipped it away and smacked you with the "stick", a threat of imminent poetry. It was an experiment. I promise not to do it again.)