Fried Fish
While I hesitate to overestimate the importance of this blog in your life, you may have observed that the postings on Throwing Poo have grown increasingly infrequent over the past two months. Or maybe you just noticed that the little voice pestering you to strap C4 to your chest and take revenge on the local Taco Bell has inexplicably piped-down, or you’ve suddenly become regular after an epic battle with constipation. In any case, let’s just say that all good things must come to an end. So dust off your chemistry set and stock up on Fleet enemas, ‘cause I’m back, bitches! At least I’m back until the new season of Rescue Me comes out of DVD. And the new season of Heroes. Oh, and Battlestar Gallactica, too. And Weeds. Entourage. Maybe we’ll even check out The Office. But probably not Monk. Definitely not Jericho. Skeet Ulrich looks like he’s on crystal meth, and the dialogue totally eats shit.
“So,” I imagine you asking, “why haven’t you been posting?”
While I do enjoy writing posts for this blog, I’m not sure I like the effect blogging is having on me. When I started this piece-of-shit a year and a half ago, I told myself that building readership didn’t matter. The purpose was to have fun, try to develop my writing skills and decide whether or not I had the stuff to be a writer. Not a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist or a famous playright, but maybe good enough to earn a few bucks penning catchy culinary slogans for the new T.G.I. Friday’s menu (“If you top an hamburger with a fried egg, is it still technically a hamburger? Eggs-actly!). All I needed was a place to unload my cluttered mind and just enough readers to keep a steady pressure on me to write. And it pretty much worked.
Unfortunately, over time I became more and more obsessed with having readers. Even so, I couldn’t actually bring myself to do anything to build readership. The reason is the same as why I have never gotten orthodontia: it just seems like an indulgence of vanity. Straighter teeth aren’t going to suddenly make me beloved just as a few hundred begged-up readers wouldn’t make me a writer. These are just external symptoms of greater underlying conditions, and calming them won’t cure anything.
Anyway, it took me a few months to remember that I do this for fun and, in and of itself, it will lead to nothing. As long as I get what I need from it, it doesn't matter if anyone else reads it or not.
So, like the infamous Jerry Springer, Ohio native and shoddy procurer of prostitutes, I leave you (and by "you" I mean "me") with a final thought:
The mind of a blogger: that creepy, isolated house at the end of the street where the walls are painted with peeling ambition and the floor covered in a brown, sticky coating of insecurity. And above the fireplace…Christ, is that a human femur bone in the ashes? Never mind. Above the fireplace is the large, looming self-portrait of a scaly old man with gills, covered in lesions and bloated from years of feasting on embellishments and betrayed confidences. And in the yard is a small pond in which the blogger swims. A tiny, incestuous pond. A fucking mud puddle of a pond that, if it were honest, would immediately evaporate at the first light of day.
