Verb sap

My reasons for not writing anything for a while stem from a complex combination of laziness, introspection, disgust with my life and what I’m letting it turn into, and a laptop whose screen won’t stay up straight. I would therefore hesitate to call it a writer’s block. But what if it were…wouldn’t that be poignant? Like that 150 year-old tree falling in the uninhabited depths of the Amazonian rainforest, with no around to mourn it. A very private sorrow, the kind only Amazonian trees know of.

Someone asked me once how I could bear writing anything personal on a public forum. I assumed that she assumed that I was a confessional blogger, and in horror, I tried to tell her that I wasn’t like them - I don't write, for instance, about my fears and my cats and my toenails. I write about stuff I am interested in, I explained, which rarely involves writing about myself (the unspoken implication being that I didn’t care enough about attracting new readers to change what I wrote about). But like Jules would say, that shit ain’t the truth. Or it's only a small portion of the truth. The truth, or the larger, more significant part of it, is that only 1.7% of the world's bloggers write for themselves. The rest are writing for one very singular reason – they want other people to read it. The may sell out, they may adopt a personality, they may not consider these distinctions worth making at all – but they all want readers. So in reality there are only two kinds of bloggers – the ones with readers, and the ones without. Dividing the latter into deserving and undeserving is pointless; natural selection will take care of them.

If all this is a bit too arcane
put it down to free market gain
Great Expectations to digest
and verbum sapienti satis est