I write you this blog while in the union, via handheld, using the tap-screen keyboard. I may have to stage a photo some time so as to

I walked out of my class this evening with my professor, Ron Rindo, and he asked me if I was still making with the blog, and of course I responded affirmatively. Since I’m here waiting to see if Kevin will get out of his class early and join me for coffee, there seemed to be no better time.

What has begun to trouble me more and more, though, is the mainstream appropriation of blogging — turning it into a trendy, simple, fun, easy, and understandable activity that any dufus with access to a computer can participate in and enjoy. And trust me, they are out there doing it in droves. What I’d really like, and what I communicated to Ron, is to come up with a new device that serves all the purposes of blogging without actually involving the act of blogging itself. I am nowhere near developing such a device, so this will, for the time being, have to suffice.

If you should ever happen across a blog in your Internet travels that TRULY sucks ass, please do me and the rest of the Western world a favor: email that blogger and request that they cease and dissist immediately. Your letter could be very simple, something like this:

“Hello INSERT NAME OF BLOGGER:

“I have read your blog. It is awful. It has absolutely no redeeming qualities, whether cultural, social or otherwise. Please stop.

“Thank you,
“INSERT YOUR NAME HERE”

You will be doing all of mankind a great service.

Of course I have considered that to offer such an opinion of blogging and bloggers in my own blog is to invite such harsh (but polite) criticism upon myself. Most likely this criticism will come from Wordell, Lorch, Schrubbe, or Kevin, and even if it should come from someplace outside, I am willing to stand up to it. For god’s sake, I could use some incentive to imagine the proverbial “metablog” into existence.

The simple truth is that no one should actually expect such an email as noted above to cause a blogger to stop his blogging. The only such email that might work is one that said, “If you don’t stop blogging, we are going to kill this box full of puppies. No kidding. We will do it,” and even then we would have to hope that the blogger in question likes puppies.

The best anyone can hope for is that the message gives the blogger pause, the next time he sits down at the terminal, to really consider what he is contributing to the annals of human history with this tiresome, self-fulfilling catalogue of minutiae whose only truly interested audience is himself.

To accomplish that, a spiral notebook is cheaper and, at least, biodegradeable.