A Tribute to Personal Pages
People used to keep blogs the way you’d keep a diary or a journal. You were writing for yourself. Now if you want to tell someone about your day you have to be quippy and overzealous. You have to make the story about your reader, something they can relate to, some generic situation they can see themselves in. You can’t just say, ‘Sarah’s boobs looked nice today’ online anymore. For one thing, objectifying someone is a no-no. Plus, nobody knows who Sarah is. They don’t care that her boobs looked good. You have to say, ‘that hottie in the office everyone has a crush on looked extra appealing today’. This generalizes the situation into something relatable no matter the gender or sexuality.
Everyone has a hottie in the office. Maybe it’s you and you know you were looking fine as hell.
So blogs are no longer really a diary but a biography told in anecdotes and that seems a lot less artful. It’s constrictive and scripted.
There can be no lyricism if you are simply following a formula.
No originality, no spark of life.
Yet we read articles written this way, addicted to the predictability, the comfortability of the formulaic story.
But when we do read a piece that is truly inspiring we often remember its form, its shape and how unlike it was from the others.
Maybe we should stop caring about the Jones’s and whether or not we’re “keeping up” and just tell a damn story the way we want to tell it.
Or maybe I have it the wrong way ‘round.
Either way, I’m the one that needs to stop caring if nobody reads my stories and just write the damn things because I want to read them. Because at the end of the day, at the end of your life, the only experience that matters is yours and whether you enjoyed it. Besides, writing into the void is a lot more freeing — nothing matters.
