The Corpuscle

That's backwater. Not backwash.

But anyways...

The other morning -- the morning after the Whitehouse Correspondents' Dinner, in fact -- I posted a little goof about the Colbert thing. Later in the day, I noticed the Colbert thing was all over the internets. Not that there is any cause-and-effect connection, I hasten to make clear. This is a backwater blog; it has never led any sort of internet conversation, ever.

But I must tell you that as soon as I realized The Colbert Thing had become a cause celebre on the left, I lusted for some Big Shot Blog, a "frontwater" blog, so to speak, to link to my little Colbert goof. I resisted the urge to whore the thing around. Regular readers will recall that I made a vow some number of posts ago that from where the sun then stood, I would blogwhore no more, forever. That decision (to not blogwhore, I mean) was essentially an instinctual one. I knew I didn't like doing it. I didn't really know why I didn't like it, but I knew that I didn't, and so I quit doing it. This morning, it occurs to me why I'm glad I did.

My pal Avedon links to a post on The Colbert Thing at Firedoglake. As of this moment (hitting the "Reload" button...), there are 256 responses to that post. Just skimming those responses, they seem to gather themselves into a relatively small number of ideas. Well, you know, what else is new? That's kind of the nature of the beast. There are a bunch of us out there, and on any given subject many of us think basically along the same lines.

Except as ego-boo, who would want that many responses? I don't mean that as a slam against anyone; I mean it as an expression of my feeling on the subject, and nothing more. I like my little band of loyal Corpusculites. I like getting to know them. They say interesting things. They sometimes make me laugh. Sometimes they make me rethink something I said in one of my posts. A few of them even offer me special discount prices on Cialis, or free downloads of thousands of .mp3s.

I confess that when I first started this blog back in November of 2004, I had sugar-plum fairies dancing in my head. I confess I suspected that before long I would be (as above) leading the internet conversation. A moment of clear-headed consideration would have set me straight on that dubious proposition soon enough. I have always been something of a weirdo -- something of an acquired taste that not all that many people have ever bothered to acquire.

The older you get, the more you realize things like that happen for a reason, and this morning I'm reminded again of that truth. This blog is not some well-kept secret. It's not some hidden jewel. It's not small and relatively untravelled because of its ruthlessly uncompromising nature. Far, far, far, far from it.

It is what it yam and that's all that it yam, and that's the way I like it.

I have written a few posts that I am extraordinarily proud of, and I'm glad a goodly number of people have managed to find and read them. Sometimes they have been pointed to by blogs with bigger readerships. Other times strangers to this place have found them on their own, often through exceedingly poignant search phrases like "death of a friend" or "i'm gay and want to stay in the closet" or "diabetic cat pooping outside the box". Okay, that last one isn't so poignant, but I am proud to have been of some service to other diabetic cat owners.

In some limited but nevertheless important sense, this blog is me. I don't think I could cope with 256 responses to me all at once. Or -- better put -- I doubt very much that very many of those 256 responses would have anything to do with me. It is absolutely true that I am an egomaniac, as evidenced by this blog; it's just that my egomania is of the self-obsessed variety, as opposed to the needing the ego-boo that comes of hundreds of thousands of hits variety.

So. This is a happy little backwater blog. Quiet and "underpopulated" and a bit too remote for many people's tastes. That sound you hear? That's the creaking of my rocking chair out there on the old wooden porch, overlooking the pond of me.