Gary Turner, in the manner of all Men of a Certain Age, has been agonising over his writing ability, and the social interactions afforded by blogging.
I've been blogging small time for a month or 2. So far I've made contact with precisely no one, although I've scored an entry on the Emptybottle blogroll along with about 873 others. My own site counter sits somewhere around the background-noise level; if I discount my own frequent and anxious visits looking for comments -- 3 so far, all some kinda automated response offering domain hosting or chickenpox cures -- we're close to zero.
But yeah, I hold out hope that 1 day there'll be a response. Perhaps I'll get linked to. Why not? I don't have the brains of Doc Searls or Joi Ito or any of the others I read, can't write like Chris Locke can, but I write OK. I can be funny-ish. I make people laugh, and think.
I don't need to blog for myself. I can happily or, more usually unhappily, work through things in my own, chaotic mind. That's me mumbling out loud on the train or in the street as I conduct my own little Socratic dialogue about whatever it is that's bothering me most today. That's me with the embarassed look as I realise I've been mumbling out loud.
But I read Doc, or Gary Turner, or Halley, and I want to talk back. To say, "Right on!", or, "Er?"; to converse, to swap ideas, to be recognised. I recall seeing a letter in the newspaper, rebutting some article from the day before. Except the article was syndicated from another country, maybe months' old, and no way was the author going to ever see that letter. "You fool!", thought I. But with blogging, I CAN talk back, even if none of these people have time to reply to my emails.
And so I plod on with my square, stodgy prose, grammatical terrorism, and the rest of it. I'm sure someone will talk to me. One day.
11:27:39 PM 
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