A Creeping Return From Sweet Blogsylum

Ah, sweet blog vacation.

There's a great chapter opening in Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men where the narrator guy who has a crush on the sweet girl goes to the sweet girl's house, the girl opens the door and it becomes apparent that sweet girl has been having an affair with the morally bankrupt Willie Stark. Our crushed crush-having narrator guy then immediately drives west from Louisiana all the way to the West Coast, holing up in seedy hotel rooms.

At least that's the way I remember that chapter. And I'm still too blog vacation-esque to go about looking up the actual book. Like narrator guy, I decided to hole up in the metaphorical equivalent of some seedy non-Net wired motel rooms for a few days, smoke some figurative cigarettes and throw some metaphysical playing cards into a symbolic fedora.

I'm back in town now, so to speak, but still somewhat mentally stuck in that figurative hotel room back in Barstow. How did I get here? And why did I go there? Let's see, I think it all started a few days back with some rather foolish time spent on the internet looking into matters having to do with NM folks who want to impeach President Bush. Or maybe it was before that, quite a bit hazier now looking back, with the realization that blogs and blogging seem to be more boring and useless than ever. Burque Babble most boring and useless of all.

I seem to remember looking at Duke City Fix posting pictures of a baby chimpanzee on the day the Scooter Libby verdict was announced, while Daily Kos members talked about how Libby was the tip of the iceberg and that Cheney, Bush, Reagan, Warren Harding and Nikita Krushchev were all gonna resign within the next 45 minutes because of it. And then I sort of black out, but vaguely recall having myself posted some incredibly boring tripe about standardized testing.

Yeah, it's coming back to me now. I distinctly recall saying "blogs have jumped the shark" to myself, then falling backward in my chair like Terry Gilliam when he gets that heart attack in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". Then I got up and tried to avoid having anything to do with blogs for a few days.

Oh, I visited some sites, got into a sparring match with an impeachment zealot or two, but basically I just went off to the figurative Crossroads Motel and unblogged myself. Now, I'm back, but I have to say I didn't miss bloglessness a bit. Totally unaffected, like that time the TV broke and you didn't have enough money to fix it, and spent a week without TV and then got paid and could fix it and thought to yourself, "why would I want to fix my TV?"

But then you went ahead and fixed the TV, and pretty soon forgot about having ever thought twice about getting it fixed in the first place. And two days from now, while surfing between Wonkette, Metafilter and Cocoposts, I'll probably forget all about my blog-free vacation and how I didn't miss it at all. How any semblance of liberal angst seem to slip off like an easy girl's skirt, and how I didn't really think too much about how Dick Cheney is really Satan, or Al Gore does or doesn't use energy credits.

I will admit, though, that I noticed that ElectaBill Richardson signed the Cockfighting Ban. And that I was cheered up a bit. I still haven't checked out a "blog" about ElectaBill's signature yett. I wonder what do those kooky bloggers think about it? I also wonder...if I don't check out blogger response to news, is it still news? Is it the same news? Or is it somehow changed, twisted and excreted somehow, like sausages being processed at a rendering plant?

I don't know. And what the Hell should I care? What the Hell should you care? It's just some stupid blogs we're talking about. Including this one. Especially this one. Still, I've always been drawn to the stupid, pointless exercises of life, as long as those exercises admitted up front they were stupid and pointless. I can't say much for this stupid, pointless blog, but I can say this: we're never gonna take ourselves too terribly serious here. I kinda wish the same was true for much of the rest of the blogosphere, even the supposedly non-stupid, important blogs. Maybe especially those non-stupid, important ones.