Title says it all. My devotion to this blog has been on the wane and I haven’t added to it in over six months. I figure I should change that or it’ll end up on the slag heap of things I used to do.
Attention spans have never been my strong suit. My love of bright, shiny objects coupled with a crippling inability to truly give a shit have made me a dilettante in pursuits where I have some talent and an utter washout in those where I don’t.
As a Californian, this has worked well for me. People who live here aren’t defined by their station in life, but rather who they aspire to be. I’m a wannabe writer who works as a computer nerd. Others are hoping to be professional musicians and work in the service industry. Still others are self-styled Renaissance men still paying their dues in the incel daily grind. We are all dreamers and our dreams are what we are.
Please note that this only applies to coastal Californians. Those who dwell inland are really just displaced Oklahomans complete with twangs and reactionary politics. They don’t count.
What’s nice is that there is nothing that says you have to chase one dream at a time. When I got depressed that no one was reading my blog (never mind that it was covered in cobwebs), I decided to start making TikTok videos to provide me with a validation fix.
The audience was certainly larger than my Poison Spur readership. Most of my videos have at least a couple of hundred views, which is miniscule for TikTok but high for me. There was even one with over 10 thousand views. None of the others got anywhere near that and I don’t know what made that one so special. I affected a smooth vocal quality a bit like Tweak’s dad on “South Park” and talked about a very long eyebrow hair I have. The crowd went wild. Go figure.
Most of my videos remind me that I’m a better writer than I am a talker. Like Joe Biden, I can get tongue tied saying the simplest things. On the plus side, my poop jokes can get a few likes, especially from high-school and middle-school kids. That shouldn’t surprise me. I was not quite 13 when I saw the campfire scene in Blazing Saddles. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. It would be foolish to expect the youth of today to be any different.
I’ll keep making videos because it’s fun and doesn’t require a lot of mental energy, but it’s ultimately just going to be a sideline. Even if I figure out how to be TikTok famous, the payoff is fleeting. There’s not much immortality in having a momentary flash of notoriety that quickly fades to just another drop in an ocean of noise.
It’s not that I want to be famous in any real sense. I used to want that before I learned to appreciate being left alone. What I’m looking for is to accomplish something that I can look at and say “Yeah, I did that.” It has to be enough of something to offset a few shortcomings, but that’s about it. And yeah, I hope for some praise because I’m broken enough to implode without validation. I just hope it comes in written form so I can enjoy feeling smug without worrying about how I am supposed to react.
At some point before too long, my day job will have run its course and my new reality will have more time and fewer excuses. How much time is anyone’s guess. On the one hand, I haven’t exactly made life choices with an eye on longevity. Then again, my track record is not that of a person who is easy to kill. So who can say?