Posters

I have posters in my room. When I wake up in the morning, I see one with a cat. There's a cat on a limb and he's hanging by the tips of his claws. And he's telling me to Hang in There Baby.

"Woo," he's saying. "Hang in there, baby. Today's the day, baby.

"Today's the day you're going to blog, baby," he tells me. "Today you're going to really do it, and do it up right, baby.

"This is it, baby," he tells me. "This is so it. It's the day you'll blog.

"You're the best, baby," he tells me. "You're the coolest, and the smartest, and the most determined guy around. You've got the skills and the smarts to blog way, way awesomely, baby.

"You are so ready, baby," he tells me. "This is going to be great."

It really gets me excited. Excited to blog awesomely.

But on the next wall—the wall right below my computer—there's another poster. It's a unicorn.

A unicorn in a starscape. With a rainbow. Alone. Stately. Powerful. Too much.

I can't measure up. Not to the powerful star unicorn.

I can't blog after that.

Napkin

It's very difficult to get a blog these days. They are scarce, rare as diamonds. And valuable. I would very much like to have a blog. On the blog I would blog. Every day I would sit down to blog on my blog. Yes, given the chance I would certainly love to verb on my noun.

But, alas.

I do not have a blog, because they are hard to find. You can't simply go online and sign up—free!—for a blog. What kind of a world would it be if you could, do you think? Pretty astonishing. It would be a wild and beautiful world if everyone of us could have a blog of our own. We'd all be so free and so very lucky if we could—every single one of us!—have a blog of our own.

But, alas.

I've no blog. Can't find one. Can't get one. And so, I write on napkins. Little, soiled napkins. I find them and I write on them. I write about how much I wish I could blog. I take soiled napkins from restaurants and bars and hotdog stands, and stick them in my pocket, and I bring them home with me. I take out a ballpoint pen, and I grab the napkins from the bottom of my pocket, and I write on them. And I take those napkins and drop them from my window. They fall into the alley behind my apartment. People pick them up and read them.

People like you. You standing there with this soiled napkin in your hand, reading.

Nail

Welcome to Tool Town. This is Tool Town and I am a nail.

The Hammer is the mayor of Tool Town. The Hammer is a natural politician, as he more than any other, is able to stay on message. The Hammer just pounds and pounds and pounds. He is direct. He is relentessly on task and he has only one. He keeps the nails in line, and we love him for it.

The Screwdriver often runs against the Hammer, but he just can't win. He turns either way and therefore is too nuanced in his messaging. The Screwdriver works better behind the scenes.

I am a nail in Tool Town, and therefore I can not blog.

In Tool Town, only the screws blog.

Moon/Tree

In 1971, a former smoke jumper named Stuart Roosa arrived at the moon. He didn't get to go down to the surface. He stayed on the ship. He waited for two others to come back. With him, he had a cannister filled with seeds.

The seeds were tree seeds. They went to the moon.

They orbited the moon, in a little metal cannister, and never got to look out the window.

But, trees don't have eyes, and tree seeds certainly don't have eyes. So, it didn't really matter.

The tree seeds came back. They were germinated, and sent around the country. And people forgot to write down where they all went.

Of the hundreds sent out, only fifty or so are known.

Of the others, I am one. I'm a Douglas Fir in a national park. People walk by me all the time and never know I've been to the moon.

And I can't blog. I'm a moon tree, an unknown moon tree, and moon trees don't know how to blog.

I'm sorry.

Wrong

I was going to try to blog, but I realized that there is something fundamentally wrong. There is something fundamentally wrong with the way I write sentences. I am writing my sentences all wrong, and it's happening at a structural level. Right off the bat. Before I even begin to write the sentences I would write in order to blog, there is something wrong.

My writing is wrong.

And, you can't see it. That's the tricky part. It's not anything to do with my rather pedestrian syntax. My sentence fragments. What's wrong with my sentences? It can't be parsed. Not by a grammarian. It can't be judged by a critic. Or any reader, really.

The thing that's wrong with my sentences is buried so deep, it's a secret to everyone but me.

This makes sense—in a way. You're reading this, and it makes sense. I think it makes sense.

But, it also makes no sense at all on a fundamental level. But, you don't notice the part that doesn't make sense, because it is happening before this is typed out.

It's like, Borges said he didn't like sans serif fonts. They were stripped down. The architecture of each letter was ugly because it was unadorned. It's like that.

Or, wait. No it's not.

Or, maybe.

I just don't know.

I just know that because everything is completely wrong and fucked up before it even begins, I can't blog.

Short

I want to blog. I really want to blog. I do. It's just that I can't reach. I just can't reach.

See, I wasn't, as a child, given proper nutrition. I didn't grow big and strong. And tall. I didn't grow tall. And now I can't reach. And now I can't blog.

Camera

My name is Steve Fridge, and I was the camera operator for the movie Oh God! You Devil. It was the third movie in series of Oh God! movies that starred George Burns. He played God. In Oh God! You Devil, he also played the Devil. John Denver was in the first one, but did not appear in Oh God! You Devil. You may remember the scene where God (Burns) is on the radio and makes it rain in John Denver's car. It was directed by Carl Reiner and Terri Garr was also in it.

There was a second, not as good movie, too, called Oh God! Book Two. Oh God! You Devil was even worse.

I read something about Plato: that there's an ideal, and real versions of the ideal, and as you get farther away from the original, they get worse and worse.

Or, when you make a photocopy, and then photocopy the photocopy, the image degrades.

I was the camera operator for the most degraded Oh God! movie.

So, I really don't want to blog.