The Bloggers Ball

The Bloggers Ball
My blog seems to be very slow in taking off. I know that numbers aren’t everything but 49 visitors in 4 weeks means if this was a dance I’d be a wallflower. I’d be sitting there in that morbid collective of boring bloggers. In fact not only boring but physically clumsy and ugly with ill-fitting cheap clothes, no money and to cap it all, a crushingly sensitive self-consciousness. We’d be staring out at the dance floor watching all the beautiful bloggers moving with a completely natural and easy sensuality and laughing into each others smiley open hideously successful faces. And we would want to knock their blindingly white teeth right out of their mouths. Spider -thoughts of herding these scumbags into Abhu Graib and causing them hideous sexual humiliation with dog leads and electrodes would crawl across our synapses while we outwardly smiled and took nervous sips from our rum punch.
This is how it always is. The internet has acquired the competitive tendency like a teenager acquires pimples. You must have followers. You must make money. You must have hits. You must acquire ‘marketing skills’. You must imbibe the writers discipline even if it be boiling oil hot from the nipples of Lucifer himself. And don’t forget you must make money. You must surf the limitless wave that is the next big thing in publishing. Oh and did I mention you must make money?
I have been a writer since I upped like the sassy little twat I was and wrote a poem about a deer being killed in the forest by a hunter. I must have been thirteen. I was at boarding school in Hampshire in the UK and it was just about the point I realised that everything, absolutely everything I had been told about the world, politics, history and especially religion was utter bum-twaddling, brain-mouldering, arsewipe. I was like the guy in those sci-fi movies who goes walking on the spacecraft and ends up having an anti-magnetic moment and spins off into the limitless vacancy of the Cosmos screaming soundlessly and tumbling like a gnat into the gaping maw of the Mandelbrot Dragon. Just writing these words I am also suddenly aware that it was also about this time I gave up on becoming an astronaut as an unrealistic career choice.
Anyway…My poem went down pretty well with the guys (all guys at my school) and I realised I was already what I wanted to be-A WRITER! A STORYTELLER! A WORD-ENCHANTER! A TEACHER!
My poem by the way was utterly crap. But I learned something about the power of the written word, for both good and ill.
In English class I started writing stories about satanists and rapists and death and people who did unpleasant things to horses, and writing I saw, could become an assault on the status quo. Words were weapons and the powers that be were fair game. One day I’ll post on how auto-erotic writing got me through puberty!
I wrote through my twenties, thirties, forties and now into my fifties. I have been spectacularly unsuccessful in publishing terms but I am in every fibre of my being , a writer. A word-onaut spacewalking out on the flight deck of story, awaiting my own anti-gravity moment!
I don’t need your internet publishing be –a- writer- in –thirty- days scams. I’d rather be a wallflower with a literary grenade held surreptitiously between my arse cheeks, waiting for the propitious moment.