Aspirations

Someday I would like to pull someone from the burning wreckage.

shawnflynn03291150 has no penis

Ah, my first comment spam! Truly heartwarming. I quote it here, minus its links:

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Nice online dating site you have there, shawnflynn03291150, I looked at your blog, and I thought yours was cool too, dude, it was like all BLANK and everything. Here’s a free virtual spammer-smack upside the head and a John Cleesesque pail of milk poured down your pants, shawnflynn03291150.

Defender of Truth, Justice, Lawn Care, and the American Way

My lawn is kind of a problem. As a male suburban homeowner, I believe that the world expects me to take pride in my lawn, but it seems to be beyond me to feel like expending the necessary energy in so superficial a pursuit. (Especially when there are books to read, cats to pet, and music to imagine.) I really, truly dislike mowing, although a grudging sense of neighborhood obligation and fear of possible neighborhood opprobrium keeps me doing it every three weeks whether it needs it or not. My front yard is in the process of becoming a creeping charlie lawn – sort of like faux grass. (Pate de faux grass, heh.) It doesn’t help that my damned suburban Republican neighbor has what I think can be categorized as an unhealthy obsession with his lawn, either. As I write this, I can hear the tines of his rake scratching, scratching, scratching on the edges of his driveway as he trims his yard’s cuticle, so to speak, god, make it stop, make it stop!!! I envision him on his belly, trimming the individual blades of grass around his sidewalk with tiny scissors, thinking happy thoughts about how much good we’re doing the people of Iraq, how good a job we’re doing at defending the sanctity of marriage, and how the world is a safer place now that Bill Clinton is no longer in the White House. I thought he was all right until I saw the W04 sign on his well-manicured lawn in 2004. Does being a Republican make you crave a lawn like a putting green, or does being obsessed with proper sprinkling and dethatching turn you into a Republican?

At times I feel rather like an outsider with dangerous views out here in the suburbs, probably already attracting attention because of my back yard, where I’m conducting an experiment. I’m basically letting it go natural. It’s becoming a very green, wild, and pleasant place, with vegetation nearly waist-high in places. It’s all fenced in, and I’m hoping that no neighbors care enough to start researching city statutes for some seldom-enforced ordinance requiring grass to be neatly mowed and no longer than four inches from average ground level to the tip of the blade. I’m imagining this as a sort of lawn dress code, possibly one that could be defined so that the length of the grass could be no taller than the hemline of a kneeling middle-school girl who is in turn compliant with her school dress code. Sometimes I wonder what makes me come up with this kind of mapping of one surreal scenario to another… I do live in fear that the lawn police will arrive at my door with a citation someday, catching me with Anne Frank in my attic, so to speak.

Incipit Liber

Okay, so what kind of blog should this be? I have no clue, I've blogged a bit at myspace.com, but Hah! I just tried to log in to see what my oh-so-intuitive URL was there so I could cite it (it's like www.myspace.com/47365288334 or something) and received a perfect illustration of one of my pet Myspace peeves - "Login is temporarily disabled while we fix some database problems." I do declare, they must use Radio Shack TRS-80's for servers (with the 32 kilobyte memory expansion).

Another thing that I'm not sure about at Myspace - it's so JUVENILE. Yes, there are a few people on there who are over 25... It seems at times to consist of nothing but 17-year-old girls who post the sluttiest possible pictures of themselves that the Myspace rules will allow and then see how many drooling boys they can get to ask them to be "added" as "Myspace friends". Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it seems so terribly shallow, so desperate for approval. Even some of the girls understand that it's trivial, I've seen a number of pictures of girls posing in some sort of relatively cheesecakey calendar-girl pose, with a caption something like "My obligatory 'hot girl' pose".

So, I think that I'm looking for a slightly more serious blogging environment, one without the distraction of bulletin spam from people whose friend invitations you accepted and wish you hadn't. I never really figured out what my blog should be over there, witty observations, deep thoughts, personal musings, band diary, or some combination of these things. Does a blog need to have a consistent tone? What is a blog even for? Is it primarily for you. the reader? Is it primarily to salve the ego of me, the writer? "Look how clever I can be! Me, me! It's all about me!!" I'm not sure.

What should this blog be? Comments invited. If nobody pipes up, I'll just do whatever I feel like doing, as usual. If I get suggestions, I'll just do whatever I feel like doing, as usual.