A shameless plug

I don't lightly link blogs to mine. They have to demonstrate versatility and intelligence, seasoned with humor. I skim through about a dozen blogs a day -- hey, I'm a fast reader, it's a gift -- but only make a link about once a month.

Currently, the two most active blogs on my daily read list are chasemarch and ilovesquishingants. The former is a teacher who not only blogs about that subject, but also about his love of hip hop and other cultural phenomena. The latter is a student of biology, genetics and such, and She blogs about life, love, science, religion and a dozen other subjects.

The blog world can be at times a desert of dullness -- endless baby photos, emo whinings and celebrity gossip. In the blowing sand, the gems are sometimes obscured.

So here's a suggestion to any and all of my readers. Check these two blogs out and add your thoughts to their conversations. Help to abolish unjustified obscurity.

We'll all go away enriched.

Blog ruminations

So I've done this blog thing for a couple months now -- and find it to be both frustrating and yet satisfying.

I'm a writer, cursed from childhood with the urge to scribble my thoughts, whether the world gives a damn or not.

I have written my thoughts in little notebooks about virtually every book I have read in the last ten years, like some stupid kid unaware that I'm out of school and don't need to do that anymore. Hello -- anyone home in there? (Sound of echo heard within empty head).

I've kept a journal for twenty years and counting, 99 percent bird poop and maybe one percent intelligent thoughts.

I've written a weekly column for a local newspaper for ten years.

I've badgered my way into writing articles for local magazines.

And still I seek more ways to punish myself.

Thus, this blog. In here, I can be almost 100 percent honest, because if I ever get crushed by a tractor trailer on some bad day, or summon the courage to pay some hotel room escort to blow her cigarette smoke at me until I die in ecstasy from a secondhand nicotine overdose, no one who knows me will ever know this blog even exists. They'll have to satisfy themselves with only the far less juicy scribblings in my journal.

But a blog is work. Some bloggers seem satisfied to just write and write and never get any comments from anyone. They don't even care to reply to the few that trickle in by chance.

Me, I crave comments. I open this blog everyday hoping for the Christmas present of a response. Sometimes, Santa forgets to stop by my computer.

You see, a blogger has to work for his or her responses. There are tens of thousands of blogs out there and who in hell has the time to sift through them all, the dross and the gold?

So you have to visit other blogs and actually read them and make comments and hope that someone will eventually become curious enough about their commentator (commentor?) to follow you back to your blog.

And then, if you keep working on the blog-to-blog relationship, you find a friend. And then you have to be careful, because in the cyberworld, nobody can see you smile. Or wink. A little joke can seem an insult. And that friendship can die in a splat of miscommunication, as quickly as a bug on a windshield.

P.S. This post is dedicated to Lance (toughmindwarmheart) and Adena, (ilovesquishingants) the first two enablers of my blog addiction. Smart folk the both of them. Blogs worth your reading.