No particular reason

Since someone asked...

I don't read many blogs. If I didn't write everything on this site, I probably wouldn't read it. This isn't an indictment of blogs, or of the writing abilities of the blogging public. There are shitloads of people who can write, and many of them put forward some seriously interesting shit, I'm sure. Ironically, however, I don't happen to be a huge fan of the genre.

This is going to come across as arrogant, but what doesn't on this site? It's not intentional in this case. I simply don't like reading anything on my computer screen. I don't have the patience for it. If someone's blog entry starts off slowly, and my attention wanders, that's it. I'm done, and I won't be back for at least a day or two.

It's nobody's fault, really. If blame is to be assigned, let it all fall on me and my inability to concentrate on anything other than myself for more than thirty seconds at a time.

There are plenty of blogs I read regularly, or at least try to. There are a handful I consider required reading. One guy in particular had me caught in a repeating loop for the better part of a year, during which period I clicked on his link at least a half dozen times a day to see if he had updated. Another -- who has since stopped posting, but whose link is still on my "blogroll" -- regularly made me do LOL and ROTFLMAO, whatever the fuck those are. His blog was perfect because he managed to get these reactions with posts that typically ran no more than a paragraph or two in length. Perfect for me.

The only blogs I actively dislike are the ones that chronicle people's drinking exploits. These, I break down into two categories:

A. "The Sophisticate": Rain, with a splash of Dubonnet -- in a martini glass, silly -- at Soho House. And again, and again, and again, in every single post, every single day of every week. Over and over and over, until I'm tempted to go get a bouncing job at some of the places these people mention, just so I can have the pleasure of throwing them out.

"Clint" gave me absinthe once. Ted Breaux is the man.

B. "The Derelict": I don't like reading about other people's drunken evenings. This isn't because these entries are poorly written, or because they're not funny. It's because they're written by amateur "alcoholics," and they describe nothing I haven't seen. You go out, you drink until you throw up, you take home an ugly girl, you embarrass yourself. Wow, man. Never did that before.

Here's where the arrogance comes into play. Having grown up in the "major leagues," I have literally thousands of drinking stories involving me, my friends, and three-quarters of the female population of the northeast United States. Binge drinking in quantities that would make your head spin. Drug abuse -- none by me, fortunately, but I've "been in the room" too many times -- that would make junkies recoil. Fights galore, from well placed Thai kicks on Jamaica Avenue, to Long Beach to Bell Boulevard to Gansevoort to 28th Street to Wildwood to South Beach to Boylston Street to Santa Monica to Sturgis to Frankfurt to a brutal overhand right on High Street, and damned near everywhere in between. More broads than you could shake a stick at, and a vomit-inducing peek at AM3.149806's bare ass creeping down a dingy hallway.

I don't piss or shit myself. I let it out in peoples' closets, then pretend it didn't happen. Vicarious living isn't for me, so I usually skip entries where people write about pissing and shitting themselves. I spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with drunks during the week anyway, so reading about them is just about the last thing I'm looking to do with my "quiet hours."

Sometimes I'd rather read about your coffee maker.