Odi et amo

In this age of information overload, an age defined by ubiquitous twaddle about all kinds of inane and even dangerous nonsense, why another blog?  Why add another shrill voice to the screaming horde: "Pick me!  Read my book! (Never mind that it isn't really a book, just a bunch of words following each other helter-skelter in a foaming stew that somehow manages to resemble meaningful order.)  Go to my church!  (Don't forget to pay generous tithes.)  Join my political party!  (The opposition is Satan, seriously.  God might not exist, but Satan lives on the other side of the political spectrum, and people actually vote for him.)  Bomb the world!  With democracy and i-Pads, I meant to say!  (Not chemical weapons.  How could anybody think I meant that?)  Look at this stupid cat being stupid, I mean so cute!  LOL!  RFLMAO!  (WTF?  STFU!  URSFSIWTDRN!)"

Any number of glib excuses come to mind, but the truth is that blogs write themselves nowadays.  I can no more restrain the impulse to blog than you can hold back the urge to pin that image of yourself using the bathroom.  (What does one do in the bathroom, anyways?  How did earlier generations manage to live without Youtube videos instructing them on the niceties of breathing properly, or moving, let alone picking things up and putting them back down again?  I am so glad we don't live in the Dark Ages any more, those bleak times when people had to rely on barbaric deities like Good Judgement.  Did this god ever really exist? Can we resurrect him?)

In brief, since I must needs live in a world saturated in information, let me at least make myself more than just a passive consumer.  I see your Facebook profile featuring an homage to the Jersey Shore (where is Jersey, again?) and I raise you this blog, which exists to give me an excuse to forget that we were ever friends (though the Internet will always remember).  I see your hamster masturbating (or is it putting a little tiny ballot into a miniature ballot-box?), and look away quickly to regard something else--anything that will purge that image from my mind momentarily, even this sorry excuse for a blog.

I make no promises to deliver useful information.  I will not teach you how to breathe, or move, or pick things up.  I will not write a great and profitable book (at least not on purpose: may the gods of the Internet have mercy on us all if I ever manage to become too interesting).  I will not save the world from itself.  I will not fight against (let alone defeat) the Great Satan (who or whatever that is).  But I will resist the slings and arrows of your outrageous fortune where it intrudes upon mine, whether roughly or seductively: Timeo prophetas et evangelia ferentes.  I will create my own idols of thought rather than bow down abjectly before yours, even if this vocation takes me back into the Dark Ages (inducing me to read printed books by the guttering light of infernal demons like Horse Sense).  Non serviam, ne cum tuis verbis figurisque flagrantibus ad animam excruciar.  Tum scribebo hic, ut tu quoque excruciaris, miser, si hoc legere sapias.  

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