The Uncut Pizza

Well, Never Mind, Then

Well, I’ve been writing this ridiculous blog for about five years now, so maybe it’s time I started to track it right–
I started to say, “Do it properly,” but that maybe a bit much to ask at this late stage of the game. I yam what I yam.
But here’s the thing: I was on MSN spaces for all that time, and I liked it, for the most part. Lately it seemed to get bothersome, and some of the changes I didn’t like. I decided to move to wordpress, and leave the old MSN page up as an archive.
Then along comes MSN and says, yo, that’s a good idea you had, moving to wordpress. We’re going to make everyone do it. Well, it is exactly what I would have done, and they helped me do it. Last night I decided to take the plunge and migrate everything to wordpress. It was a fairly simple process. And everything came over, except my lists and things–but I had already saved those.
Even the comments on my blog came over, and as a consequence I stayed up way too late reading them, and reminiscing.
It seems that back in the day, I had a pack–a gaggle–a band of loyal readers. What happened to them all? One by one, they dropped of, dropped out, and lost interest–or realized they had lost. Detroit had explained to me that many of them were women who–perhaps much like herself–had been searching for someone. Someone to save them, take them away from their dreary, unhappy lives. They had been searching for a knight in shining armor…
Yeah, that would be me.
After she had captured my heart and reigned victorious over the intarweb’s elusive butterfly of love, the others congratulated us, said they were happy for us…and stopped coming around.
To be fair, there was a period there where I wasn’t writing on the blog as much, because I was busy being stupid in love. I know how annoying that is to see, so I can sympathize with those who saw it and said, “Ugh, no thanks.”
I know that I’m gullible, naive, innocent, and ever so slightly retarded, but I didn’t think that ALL of them were after my body and my shirt–both of which I am too sexy for, by the way. Some of them were genuinely friends, it seemed. And notwithstanding the flirting and the offers for everything from a hug and a kiss to participation in the threesome of my choosing, I did receive many compliments on my writing.
The theme running through them was that I was honest (truthfully, I don’t see it) and able to bring them into my world and my life with my words. The best example is one woman–not even a regular, but a casual reader–said that she didn’t even know me, but felt that she knew me, because of what I had written.
When I go back and look at it now, all I see is the occasional misspelled word and a propensity for horrible sentence structure. Over the past five years I’ve become a better writer (I hope), but hardly anyone reads me now.
I feel like I have Hair Band Syndrome. This is a new one, so let me explain:
Back in the 80s–the golden age of Pop music that was also the dark ages for Rock–lots of these no-talent hair bands were really popular. Loverboy, Def Leppard, White Snake, Poison, et cetera. Okay, I won’t say “no-talent.” But low. Or talented, but definitely not experienced, practiced, accomplished. Through luck and studio magic, they had some hits.
Twenty years later, after their rise and fall and individual internal crisis, they decide to learn how to play their instruments. Also, the age and experience has turned them into better performers, better musicians, better songwriters. They are better now than they ever were during their peak of fame.
And no one wants to see them. They can’t fill a bar, much less an amphitheater. A stadium? You’ve *got* to be kidding! Where did all the fans go? They grew up, and now they listen to Nirvana. Well, shit. Where did all the groupies go? You only had one, and you married her.

I’m now a better writer, technically speaking, than I ever was. I’ve also been through some serious shit, the flames of which have forged the steel that is my soul. Aged with experience and carved with cynicism, my failing eyes see the world through a bitter lens, and everything is grey and ashen to my jaded taste buds. I’ve also learned how to use a thesaurus.
Compared to the hack I was before, I’m Ernest Fucking Hemingway now. Where at go all my readers?
On one hoof, I’d like to recapture the glory and have readers again: The huddled masses, the hoi polloi, waiting desperately for my next post to give their pathetic lives meaning.
On the other hoof, we all know it’s not a good idea to encourage me too much, because it’ll just go to my head.

Just Like Starting Over