A Little Break

So, I've been taking a little break from the old blogger mill lately.

Not that I've abandoned it to some cyber alley to fend for itself amongst the digital derelicts of other well-intentioned yet uncommitted bloggers. I really do enjoy allowing my mind to wander and my fingers to follow along the keyboard as I create my fluffy bits of piffle to amuse, primarily, myself. They help me to vent many of the distractingly silly thoughts that bounce around inside my head.

There are times, though, when maintaining the blog becomes an arduous task of searching for the next best thing about which to write. Following a month in which I've handily managed two posts per week, I'll find myself suddenly dry of ideas and struggling to patch words together. In the year-and-a-half since creating "Ramblings of a Very Pale Man," I've deleted one post for every two that survived to publication. Trust me, if you've found some of the posts that made it to the blog lackluster, you should have seen the turkeys that faced the firing squad.

The simple truth is that communication is a tricky little beast. Too little of it is unhealthy. One must be able to communicate effectively with spouses, family, friends, employers, coworkers, pets and plants in order to live a productive life. Too much communication, however, can leave a person longing for silence. My Lovely Wife and I experience this fairly regularly. Both our jobs require steady streams of conversation with our respective clients that often drain us of any desire to make conversation with anyone.

This isn't anything new, of course, but in our modern age in which every person has a Facebook account, Twitter account, LinkedIn account, personal email, work email, Hotmail or Yahoo email just for junk mail, cell phone with unlimited texting, voicemail, e-fax number, and an old MySpace account to which we've forgotten our username and password, the potential for over-communicating is greater than ever.

And if it isn't bad enough that we have way too many means of intruding on each other's lives, there is a heightened level of importance associated with it all.

I'm old enough to recall a time before answering machines. If someone called for my parents and neither was in, I wrote a message on a piece of paper and left it in a conspicuous spot in the kitchen, which was where "the" phone was. I couldn't call, text, or instant message them to let them know my hypochondriac Grandfather had called with news of his monthly visit to the proctologist. Heck, if he were alive today, he'd probably be able post a photo of the lab results of his fecal exam to Facebook using his iPhone before he got home from the appointment.

Anyway, back to the blog, or not back to it -- whichever. Now that I've publicly declared it difficult to come up with ideas, I'll probably be inundated with them and shoot out four or five in rapid succession. But if I don't, it hardly matters. I doubt the fabric of society will unravel if the handful of people who read this blog have to wait another week for the next post.



© 2011 Mark Feggeler

I Got Nothing

You know the great thing about Disney movies? There are so many of them, it doesn't matter if a few of them suck.

"Pocahantes?"

Wow! That one really sucks. Nothing like making a movie for kids that makes you feel guilty about being white. Not that I think white kids don't need to understand the ugly truths about American history. They do. I just don't believe it's up to Disney, Mel Gibson, and a personified raccoon to shove a big morality lesson down their throats.

And sucky as "Pocahantes" is, it's not nearly so miserably awful as "Hunchback of Notre Dame." You have to wonder about the thought process behind funding a kid's movie about a disfigured man, a super hot gypsy woman, and a sexually deviant clergyman. What exactly about that screamed "children's feature length cartoon musical" to the suits at Disney's not-so-wonderful world of executive decisions?

The great thing about what makes something suck is that it's entirely subjective. For instance, my list of all time most horrid Disney films differs greatly from My Lovely Wife's. Topping her list would be "Wall-E."

See? I don't understand that at all. "Cars" maybe, but "Wall-E?"

What gets Disney off the hook for its occasional putrescence is its prolificacy. (It's a word. Look it up.) For every sucky movie Disney made that tanked at the theater, there are four others that soared through the air like Tinkerbell.

My point is that anyone, even an uber-imaginative braintrust like Disney, can suffer dry spells as wide and deep as the Grand Canyon. (More specifically, the desert side of the Grand Canyon, where the Brady Bunch went on vacation and got locked up in a ghosttown jail because apparently that's hiliariously good fun.) Which is why I don't worry too much about these blog posts being perfect. If Disney can afford to suck a little, then so can I.

There are times when all the bloggerific ideas are locked tightly away in some secret little vault to which I do not possess the key. Now and then I look back at the increasingly long list of posts I've published and am surprised by a few I had forgotten. Then I read them and understand why I forgot them. They suck.

Same thing goes for the fiction I'm working on. Sometimes I belly up to the computer or notebook with all the enthusiasm in the world, but nothing worthy of being written presents itself. At these times, I force myself to write something, anything, just to keep up the practice of writing.

I know if I maintain my productivity, and achieve a prolificacy, I stand a good chance of sucking less than more.



© 2011 Mark Feggeler