I can never quite forget the first time I received a comment on my blog. I was not even aware that other people were reading stuff that I wrote. A certain secret satisfaction that 'someone out there' cared enough to blurb. A rite of passage every blogger goes through. It would tally with my theory that all bloggers, more or less, are exhibitionists. Not with regard to their clothes, though there may be the odd exception, but with their feelings. We like to be appreciated for our incredible writing skills, artistic ability or photographic finesse as the case may be. ;-) And of course a bit of narcissm helps to convince ourselves that our thoughts are important enough to be read by other people.
Once you succumb to that first comment, which is usually mildly encouraging, you're a goner. Soon you are logging in and going straight to the comments section. Six years back on blogger, that was the measure of your popularity, the number of comments you had. And the number of times you logged in to check the comments section was an indication of your neurotic obsessive behaviour. Thankfully blogger didn't have 'followers' then or I would have been permanently docked in a blog rehab institution!
Pretty soon when I sit down to write I take into consideration my imagined audience. E.g. if you have too many sensitive readers, you don’t want to be f*&^!#^ rude do you ? The pressure is on dude, you have got to make them laugh, entertain them. All the attributes of the audience, your own perceived notions of course! So what started off as just a venue to blow steam and let out dirty thoughts and secret fantasies becomes an exercise in posturing. Bloody hell!
The best part of blogging has to be the 'blogging buddies'. You can impose your wish list of what qualities constitute an ideal friend, on them. They are on their best behaviour, so are you. Only if they lived longer. Of the many buddies I had six years back, only a couple survive. And they DON'T remember me now! The rest are dead. Maybe not physically but for all practical purposes for me, they are stuffed. Most leave without goodbyes, just like in real life. Their thoughts compressed into pixels still remain like an elaborate tombstone on the net.
Some weirdoes like me go into a coma for 6 years and then suddenly spurt back into life. When I read my old entries I couldn't believe I had ANYTHING TO DO WITH THEM, much less write them. But I love myself too much to delete them. Even the bad jokes copy and pasted from a website now forgotten.
Who would have thought watching traffic was so much fun? Of course I speak of the site meter. Coming from all over the world for reasons that would of course put any self respecting exhibitionist to shame. God forbid, if any of your posts contain Indian or mallu in combination with girls, s*x , hair, eyes, toe nails, back, ankle... You get the drift. All thanks to Google of course. I imagine some poor sod hunched over his lappie hyperventilating with glazed eyes as he makes his way with high expectations to the vagabond's site. My apologies to all those sods. That way traffic watching is not so great. The realization that most visitors come here to blow steam like me, but in a very different manner.
On a slightly more serious note, isn't there something fulfilling about reading what people feel when they read our little entries? Isn't that the closest we can realistically hope to getting published? And of course to read what others write is much less stressful and more pleasurable than writing! The different way people tick, think and of course Google still amaze me...
Dedicated with special affection to my blogging buddies.
