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Do you remember that movie The Blob from 1958? A kind of kitsch film about an amoeba-like organism, pink and endless, that absorbs everything and eats its way through a town, threatening to devour all of humankind. I watched it in terror at the age of 7 or 8. At the time, my favorite color was pink and there was something disturbing about how pink the blob was - so human, like the color of an organ, and not the kind you play.
Blogging is like a blob. Not to suggest that it is evil and absorbing in the ways the blob is, but it can be all-consuming and boundary-less if you're not somewhat discerning about what to include and what not to include. There are blogs, to be sure, that are not blobby. They tell you exactly what you're going to get from them the minute you touch down on their homepage. Live your authentic life. Learn how to make the most out of social media. How to write your novel. The idea being that none of us have time to wade through someone else's long litany of things, their searching for something, their struggle with the unknown. Because that would be too much to bear, wouldn't it? We don't have the time.
Well, I like the unknown, and I like taking my time.
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Blogging becomes blobby when it starts to take over and become somewhat of a daily ritual. It creeps into your life like journaling or running, and you start to practice it over and over again, one blog post after another. If you're like me, you're the kind of blogger who doesn't yet have their elevator speech for their blog, and maybe doesn't want one. You're comfortable with the ever-evolving blobbyness of it.
Sometimes I feel like the internet is a highway, and blogs become these billboards we pass by. If we want to know more, we take the billboard to heart, get off the road and visit the place. But how often does that happen when you're actually on the road? And can I jump onto the internet for a ride and not have someone trying to either sell me something or make money off of me? Truly? Can the internet really be a place for threads of slow-growing artistic inquiry and expression?
I digress.
Back to blobbiness. For me, blogging is a practice in emergence. I'm claiming my online space as an artist and allowing the space of the internet to be one more place to experiment with emerging thought and form. The internet is a place. We spend our time here, we get into conversations here. It is a land, now, in our imaginations and consciousness, as much as any other environment you might choose to experience.
I want the experience and environment of my blog, for both myself and visitors, to be like a visit to a garden or an artist's studio. A place where I tend things, share things, grow things, watch things disappear and retreat until next season. I imagine my blog emerging slowly across the vast webby land of ideas and images, spilling into the cracks of a reader's life like rain, or rising up into their day like a flower.
So here's to blobby blogs. I like mine just fine.
And a question: Why do you like to blog? How is it a part of an expressive creative ritual for you?
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