The living blog

‘MOVE THE COFFEE TABLE, BILLY’

This blog is a living thing. Even when it writes about the dead — especially when it writes about the dead, because unlike the dead it breathes and hopes and dreams. It exists, its heart beats in the blogosphere, and it suffers; it gets drunk and it wails and screams and thrashes about and stumbles and falls down. This blog is in constant danger of hitting its head on the coffee table.

As a wonderful mind who used to communicate via the ether under the name of Dot would say, in fact did say or rather wrote in a note to me, “Perhaps you should move the coffee table, Billy.” Good advice but it wouldn’t really solve the problem because wherever this blog stumbles and falls the coffee table, sharp corners and all, will be in that spot — coffee table zero, so to speak.

BLOGS, BLOBS AND BOGS

Speaking of blogs, the word blog is an unattractive and dull name for a medium that can communicate with people throughout the world in a matter of seconds. That’s a far-reaching and awesome power.

Blog is as unappealing a word as its near namesakes Blob (which devoured people) and bog, a stinking mire, which is also used in the unfortunate sense of being bogged down in your mind or bogged down at work. The technology to communicate with people anywhere across the planet in seconds deserves a better name than blog.

Blog is short for Weblog which is a personal log on the web, which in turn is a complex and intricate communication network, as in World Wide Web.

DO NOT BLOG ‘GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT’*

What one posts on a blog is an ethereal communiqué of global — and beyond, for the blog can be read by anyone in the Space Station with a Smart Phone or on the Moon or, when the time comes, Mars — of therefore potentially infinite reach and significance. So, do not blog lightly, for the effect is heavy, man.

—Header graphic from https://w-shadow.com

Herewith. in the words of J.D. Salinger, the “aesthetic evil” of the footnote:

*Apologies to the ghost of Dylan Thomas

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