We blog because we can't not blog

Ever have that itch? Call it compulsion, obsession … whatever.

Whether it’s checking your e-mail every two seconds or making a habit out of rounding up the latest gossip on your favorite celeb, we all have something we feel we just simply must do.

I started thinking about the subject after I started blogging again and I read a good friend’s writings (in her blog) on the subject. With all the junk out there, it’s true – do we need more? Does anyone care what anyone else has to say when it comes to the minutia of our lives?

I think not.

And furthermore, I think – if we did care, would we even have the time to keep up?

Definitely not.

But here I am, with the itch that must be scratched. I must write. And I must share what I write, despite the fact that no one (not even my mother, Heidi) will read it. It is entirely possible this is my way of making up for not having newspaper deadlines anymore as a writer, with my feelings of loss coming out in gobs of far-too-wordy exposés on nothing. On topics possibly not even Seinfeld could make a show out of. And if that was the show about nothing, this is the blog about nothing.

I think, furthermore, that this is the common denominator of blogs. Although some (like this one), start off with a theme, a purpose, the actual driveling of entries are so purposeless that it’s impossible for them to truly be about something.

Blogs about sports end up feeding the monster (content-needy readers) with things like the Navy football team visiting the White House, just as does like, every year since it had a team.

Blogs about celebrities devolve into who likes what kind of frappacino, and what ridiculously expensive shoes she wears to get it at Starbucks.

Or blogs expounding people’s training habits for their sports end up turning into either mindless recording of their miles or anecdotes about their shoes, watches and heart rates with personal triumphs and epiphanies sprinkled throughout their massively long pages of daily entries. Their discipline, it seems, follows through not only in their commitment to jog daily, but to keep everyone informed about those jogs by their commitment to blog daily, as well.

So why do we do it? Because we have to. Just as the title of this no-follower, no-friends blog suggests, Because It’s There.

I realize that mine comes from a writing obsession, as my friend admitted in her blog as well. I think she’s like me in that I find pleasure in noticing the oddities of life, and they are best told in writing, not speaking.

And I don’t think it’s out of self-indulgent self-interest, because then we would care if people were hanging on our last word. I couldn’t care less.

And, as itches go, I made myself feel better earlier today by finding ones far worse to scratch.

For example, on the bathroom wall inside Ernest Hemingway’s house in Cuba, you’ll find his weight and blood pressure etched in pencil for every day he lived in the house. I’m not sure I have ever known what my blood pressure is, and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know what my weight is on a daily basis.

Two-time Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling obsessively took large doses of vitamin C, which he was sure would ward off not only the common cold, but cancer as well. As far as I know, he didn’t die of either, though – so maybe he’s right.

And that brings me to the master of obsession, Mr. Howard Hughes, who spent his free time creating orders for his assistants to use no fewer than six tissues when touching a door knob to open a door, and no fewer than 12 when opening a cabinet. And that’s just the tip of the crazy iceberg.

So if we must write, and we must post these obsession-laden writings to blogs, then it simply must be done.

And does a tree falling in the woods with no one around to hear it make a sound? But I do know that a blog without a single reader still makes its impact: Because the satisfaction is in the writing.

 

Choose your obsessions

By Siddharth Anand

 

Choose your obsessions

For they are unworthy possessions

Trojan horses

They bind you

Without you realizing

They hinder your natural design

And make you completely blind

 

Choose your obsessions

For they are unworthy possessions;

They are the weeds,

You; yourself choose to grow.

Some seeds are rotten..

Still you keep them, them, you don’t throw.

 

And after the tsunami

You wonder why you were destroyed

By; your own army…

 

Choose your obsessions

For they are unworthy possessions;

They determine; the extent of your regression…

Although we must All have some,

Eggs turn into chickens

Choose your obsessions

For they are impressions

Which can determine your future

& Tomorrow’s positions

The journey; and the final decision.

 

Choose your obsessions

For they are unworthy possessions