blog (noun)
1. An online journal, typically comprising links to current news stories or other Web resources, and/or social and political commentary, and/or a personal diary, sometimes with replies from readers or RSS feeds.
to bog (verb)
1. (often with down) to become mired or stuck (especially in mud).
2. bog off (slang) to go away.
3. to bog up - to make a mess of (col).
Transitive
1. (often with down) to cause to become mired or stuck, especially in mud
bog (noun)
1. An expanse of marshland.
2. (slang) A toilet.
Here I am stuck in the blog bog again.
Words on screen. Lightning-fast I type them. Spelling errors magically correct themselves before my eyes. Zip zip! Writing is faster than thought and thoughts appear bluntly in bleak cruel incomplete incoherence. There it is for all the world to see: My spelling is perfect, but my mind is all wrong! EEEK!
Whatever happened to the privacy of writing?
Think back 200 years: Writing, what joy! What freedom! Feather plume in hand, dip in ink and take flight! A feather carries lightly on the wind, the thoughts, dreams, fantasies and wild wanderings of the mind. For birds, feathers are hollow for effortless riding of the wind; for writers, hollow to form a reservoir for ink. When the ink line dwindles on the paper, pause briefly to re-dip, then it’s back to the air currents. Splatters and splashes may punctuate the rough draft, but don’t interfere with words spewing forth on vellum like buttons from a jar: Colorful and contrasting, a clattering array of silver, bone, wood, and shell, later to be sorted and organized.
Stop! Enough fantasy! It’s a pretty image, but feathers are meant for bird-flight. In truth, writing with feathers is earth-bound and laborious. Human thought is quicker than a pen governed by gravity. However, the push of pen nib across the paper’s surface has a physical quality to be enjoyed for its own sake, and the writer’s effort has a specific, usually formal, purpose. It ends with the painstaking production of the final document; the artist-writer crafts it with beauty and solemnity, creating a product suitable for viewing. It is as beautiful to behold as it is thought-provoking to read.
The room is still. No TV, no chatter from the radio. The dimness of the room, the golden lamp glow, are comforting, reassuring. There’s no awareness of the missing-ness of TV, radio, record player, CD player, computer or cell phone. You just write.
The twentieth century converts the plume to fountain pen. Fuel stops are greatly reduced. The ink well is relegated to the artist’s shelf, while the writer pauses pen scratches only long enough to change the cartridge. Soon writers have an array of writing tools at their literal fingertips: ballpoint pens, pencils, or a heavy black typewriter.
Imagine you are there, mid-20th century, let’s say, 1952. What are you writing? A journal? A letter? A newspaper article? A poem or story? Why are you writing? To record events or organize domestic needs? To express affection to someone who will receive your message a week or month later? To express an opinion to the community via typeset printing press?
Whatever the case, you know who is going to read this thing you wrote down. You may do some revision later, but your thoughts are coherent as you write, because time is vast, the pace of life in step with the pace of human thought. When you work, it’s between you and the paper. It’s personal. You spend time with it. You live with it; you interact with it in a physical way. This combination of processes mental, corporeal, and spiritual is to writing, as water, earth and sunshine are to growing plants.
Now we have computers in all their incarnations: laptops, palm pilots, digital-this and digital-that. We have illustrations and graphs at our fingertips, at the ready for insertion into our documents. Finally, there are no more ink spatters or scribbles and scratches. Revision takes place during creation. Best of all, everything we write can be shared with the world via weblog, AKA “blog.” This is better, right?
I saw a TV show recently, Dr. Phil or Oprah, where a woman was asking for help. She had too much stuff. She couldn’t throw anything away. She was depressed. The camera panned her home, stacked floor to ceiling with boxes, piles of papers, pathways so narrow they could barely navigate from the living room to the kitchen. The woman was bogged. She couldn’t pull herself out, couldn’t arise or lift even a finger to begin to sort or toss or make any sense of the mountainous gluttonous piles. The reporter picked up a single used sock, and suggested this was a good place to start – toss that in the trash can. “Oh, but I could find a use for that,” the woman said, “I could polish my dishes with it.” This is an actual psychological disorder, called Narcissistic Personality Disorder! A product of too-much-stuff-consumer-culture, an abnormal cell growth, a cancer. Humans survived for centuries on thrift. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a healthy adaptation gone awry.
The blog bog is like that. Write think write thinkwritethinkwritethinkquestion . . . question? I have a question! I don’t have to wait for the answer! I don’t even have to get out of my chair, or reach out to the encyclopedia on the shelf next to my computer. Google! Down the Google Path! La la la la-la! What a merry trail I trod, wherever curiosity leads . . . but wait! What was the question? Oh yeah, I’m writing a paper about the blog bog! But it was very interesting to read so many experiences about too much stuff. So . . . copy paste copy paste copy paste . . . now I have a place to put it – so interesting, all this interesting stuff, I really don’t want to forget it, so I copy paste copy paste and it’s safely tucked away in a saved MSWord document called “Saved stuff for paper #4.” Now I feel better. I’ll have it forever – in case I need it – unless . . .
. . . computer crash, disc malfunction, file overload, mind overload, I forgot where I put it, lost it in an overzealous trash-purge!
But everything is fine, safe, protected. Just make a backup file. Put it on your thumb drive! Dragging files back and forth, saving saving saving, doubling and saving, backing up and saving – then the dreaded question:
‘This folder already contains a folder named ‘OWP’ If the files in the existing folder have the same name as files in the folder you are moving or copying, they will be replaced. Do you still want to move or copy the folder?’
The wrong answer could be FATAL! Precious files forever vaporized! Eeek! Stress! Fifteen files later, all labeled “OWP” or variations thereof, and I’m beginning to fear for my sanity! Perhaps someone has already named this version of mental illness. Bloggagooglebog Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I am NOT going to search for that. I AM GOING TO FINISH THIS PAPER.
I want to finish all my OWP assignments now, so I can read what everyone else has written. I want to have time to think about what they write, and send them comments. I want to do this before the end of the workshop. Also, I want to go further out into Blog World, travel abroad, read blogs from
And so, I’m done. This paper is over. I’m going to post it on the blog. Oh no. That means everyone can read it. EVERYONE. There it is. My crazy mixed up bogged up blogged up mind, exposed for all the world to see. Not to mention my sentence fragments, punctuation errors, and erroneous writing style in 2nd person P.O.V. Or is it 1st person?
Stuck. Wedged. Jammed. Lodged. Trapped. Having difficulties. Blocked. EEEK! If you’ve read this far, you know it all.
Here goes.
Author's note: I wrote this in the Oregon Writing Project, July 2005.
http://owp.uoregon.edu/
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