There is no language that is deader than HTML. Literary websites actually use this lifeless language in their supposedly serious offers of real literature and feeble attempts to generate a cancer of blog and chat entries – interest in their product - or their beautiful souls, whatever the case may be.
Why do writers with any desire to express a real human emotion reduce themselves to such a sterile context?
Exposure, I guess, and it is more obvious than the sun in the east - expose our egos at all cost, expose our desperate attempts at greatness, expose our dire need of compassion.
But most of all, we just want to be out there, getting exposure, building our brand.
Thousands, tens of thousands, all with carefully posed photos to show their earnestness, or joie de vivre, or anger, or likeness to some famous icon, or…you get the picture. The little blurbs to endear themselves to us…it goes on and on…an endless queue…utterly hopeless.
Worst of all, most of them have given up on full expression and resigned themselves to the death of HTML. It’s like trying to box with one hand behind your back. Why deal with these constraints?
It’s a sorry sight, believe me, a real wasteland.
That’s the way it is.
“So I finally figured it out.” she said to me.
“Figured what out?”
“What all this shit is about…” she waved her left hand around in the air, dropping ash on the hardwood floor.
“All this shit…” I waved my right hand about in a feeble way.
“This stuff about the Blog People.”
“Ah yes, the Blog People.”
“They get their ‘friends’ to hit them up, and praise them, and start a snowball rolling. One ass licks the next, and pretty soon they’re all on the road to Blog Heaven.”
“Blooog Heaven, so you say. What does that do for them?”
“So I say. But I had a point…” She hesitated, and stared at the floor as if it would provide an answer. Then she rose up and brightly said, “but with all the people they’ve managed to recruit to their cause by endless networking, one looks at their content and sees very little…or at least not that much…not as much as the impression they exude.”
She fell back on the couch, exhausted.
“One looks?…”
“You know what I meant…”
“Yes, but you didn’t answer my question.”
“I don’t know what it does for them. It makes them feel better about themselves. I can’t answer for their delusions.”
Life doesn’t have to this hard, really.
But for some of us it is, and I can only say that I knew exactly what she was talking about.
