When I get pulled into death’s clown car and taken on a one-way trip to that big circus tent in the sky, what will my biggest regret be? OK, never learning to vet my metaphors will rank pretty high on the list, but what else? Procrastination is the short answer. Like most short answers, it leaves out more than it includes.

It’s a cold, clear Friday morning and I’m on that part of the commute where traffic slows down as it approaches the turnoff for the San Mateo Bridge. I try to expand on the procrastination theme, but find myself distracted by sights and sounds I’ve seen and heard hundreds of times before.

It’s an aha moment and I’m about to pat myself on the back for my keen insight. Then I remember that the stuff about procrastination and clown cars was all window-dressing preamble and what I really wanted to blog about was an almost wholly unrelated topic.

Meanwhile, my decision to double down on my self-referential bullshit by writing about it instead of letting the backspace key work its magic has sent this writing headlong into a morass of meta.

What the fuck was that? I look up from my phone. I’m in Menlo Park already. Outside my window is what was once the corporate headquarters of Informix. I was a contractor there in the early 90s. At a holiday party one year, the CEO decided to treat us all to a home video of his children. This same CEO would later plead guilty to securities fraud and be sentenced to two months in federal prison. I wish the judge had known about the video incident. He might have tacked on another five years.

Now where was I? It was the point of all this. It’s always the goddamn point. Fine, I’ll get to it already.

I promote this blog five different places. The first four I’m sure you’ve heard of. They are Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and Instagram. The fifth is a site for perverts called Fetlife.

Fetlifians (or whatever they call themselves) pride themselves on being responsible members of the kink community. Much of the writing there is proclamations of how things should be. If you have the soul of a hall monitor and an affinity for riding crops, Fetlife really is the place for you. Comments to these writings agree or disagree on the rules set forth and pretty soon, what had the potential for intelligent debate quickly devolves into ad-hominem attacks and the occasional death and/or rape threat.

I ponder why my work never generate such interest as the bus passes Moffett Field. The President supposedly lands there when visiting the Bay Area though I’ve never seen Air Force One parked on the runway.

I don’t have have to ponder for long. The reasons why my stuff has failed to be a hit on Fetlife are pretty obvious. For one thing, I post links to my blog rather than copying and pasting the entries. Clicking on strange links is scary and the name poisonspur.com does not exactly inspire confidence. Visiting there could give you a virus, possibly AIDS.

I’m off the freeway now. Levis Stadium is off to the right and there is about 10 minutes left in my commute.

It isn’t just the link. The content itself is not that popular with that audience. It isn’t that I am too vanilla to understand the plight of the kinkster (oh heavens no). It’s just that I steadfastly write about what interests me and what interests me the most is myself. What I churn out has little mass appeal or bullet points to aid in its consumption.

I’m on a bridge crossing the Guadalupe River, which is little more than a creek except after heavy rains. Ahead lies the sprawling tech campus where thousands of us come each day and earn the kind of money that sends the local cost of living into the ionosphere. I’m sad to say I’m only barely complicit in this injustice. Compared to many, I don’t make dick.

I suppose I could learn to write for my market. On Felife, a surefire way to make their “Kinky & Popular” list is to cobble together a bunch of tepid kindnesses and slap on a title like “18 Things Domly O’Leatherpants Can Do To Make Weepy McSubsub Feel Less Like a Sack of Shit.” People swoon over that stuff because people are idiots.

So what’s stopping me? The short answer is procrastination. Those of you have read this whole will see that I’m thematically coming full circle, but only tangentially. Let me explain.

It is past procrastination that drives me. For the longest time, the bulk of what I wrote was scribbled into spiral notebooks and there it remained. That turned out to be fine as most of it wasn’t very good. Later I wanted some people to read what I wrote and thanks to the interwebs and social media, that was easy to get.

The problem was my love of instant gratification. I’m no genius, but I am somewhat clever so I’m able to fire off a mildly amusing quip more often than not. Fellow members of my mutual-admiration society would cough up some praise and I would feel good about myself for a while. That shit turned out to be addictive and I would go for the quick validation and never write anything of substance.

The only way to break out of that was to concentrate on writing what what I wanted to say and to hell with the rest. I wanted readers, sure, but I also wanted them to read what I wanted to write. That required some callousness in my resolve. Does my work not interest you? Tough shit. Are you triggered? Ha ha fuck you.

The bus pulls up to my stop and I step off into the cool, crisp air. As I trudge toward the building with my signature thousand-foot stare, I can take pride in being, above all things, honest.

This sounds good, but am I really that honest? I told no overt untruths either about the events of my morning commute or the thoughts running through my head. The lie was pretending that I blogged all this during one morning commute. I started writing this yesterday and the initial draft had “a cold, blustery Thursday” instead of “a cold, clear Friday.”  So what’s the big deal? In purportedly true stories, it is not uncommon to have some compression and tweaking of the facts. For example, multiple people can become a composite. Is it really so different to have two days joined into one? It isn’t, but it does throw bullshit into the mix. The end result is the false claim that I can turn my thoughts into prose in such a short amount of time. I’d like to claim that ability, but I cannot.

Of course, coming clean does have a way of spoiling the narrative so maybe you’re better off forgetting what I said. Just pretend the last paragraph doesn’t exist and picture me whipping out my phone as I walk toward the lobby and hitting the publish button without even bothering to check for typos.