Blogs and Estate 5: The Whys of Blogging

(The tone of this post will be personal. It cannot be helped, but if you were looking for the same thing you got yesterday (or, since it's just past midnight, the day before), you're not going to get it.)

The truth is, I can't do yesterday again. I don't know whether it's a feature of my psychology or my personality flaw, but my mind travels from one thing to another with a speed that occasionally unnerves and frustates me. Try getting a significant project done when your mind flits from one thing to another.

An Area of High Pressure Just Off the Frontal Lobe

Yesterday, my mind was clear about new media and blogs. Yesterday, my mind was focused, razor-sharp, on my opinions, and I could cogently discuss them like the armchair academic I clearly am not. Yesterday was good for discussion.

Not today. Today my mind is focused, razor sharp. But not on new media, not on blogs, but on a silly little game I can only play at Hani's house.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen. I'm thinking about building a clubhouse.

She's gone berserk, captain

I saw Jeff Ooi's reason for why he blogs. Hani and I spoke about that today — well, specifically, why Jeff Ooi blogs. Many flock to it because blogging, to them, is a panacea for troubled minds. Hani guessed right, and said that Jeff Ooi has something to say — actually, come to think of it, he has so much to say that others can't stand it.

Some do it because they, apparently, enjoy it. And they want to communicate with loved ones Back Home. Hani started off that way, come to think of it, before switching to blogging therapeutically.

So why do I blog? When you ask me that question, you'll probably get this stock answer: “Because people get sick and tired hearing about me blather on about some obscure thing no one else could be interested in”.

Let Off Some Steam, Matey

And that's true, most of the time. Blogging is an outlet for me. A valve that I turn everytime my creative impulse gets too much, and twists inside me like a wild beast struggling to get free.

So I might be exaggerating, but that's what it feels like, right now. Even now I see images of Avon Hall, the way I want it to be built, with red brick on the outside, sumptous luxury within, and a graveyard with ghosts outside to tempt the unwary and the unwise.

Building Them Up So You Can Tear Them Down

It's actually a very pretty cemetary. A bit too bloody well lit for a spooky cemetary, come to think of it, but I can fix that. And yes, I did manage to get tombstones and funeral urns into my community lot.

If you know the game at all, you'd know that there's only one way to get a tombstone or a funeral urn, and it's pretty goddamn grisly. To give you an idea how grisly, let's just say I spent about two hours designing four different families (the de Avons, the Cavendishes, the Suryawahyunis and members of Avon Hall), each with eight members, mostly adults and teens, with a few elders to round out the score. No children (which is a shame).

And then I spent two more hours turning them all into tombstones. And funeral urns, for those who were interred indoors.

It's a lot easier than it sounds, but it gets repetitive after a while.

Possession of Obsession Leads to Depression

A friend of mine, a Lacanian psychoanalyst-in-training, once diagnosed me as an obssessive. That is, my mind is structured to a propensity for obssession. I never got the concept as well as she did, but I understood that bit. Which is interesting, and more often than not, true.

There are plenty of obssessions with my life. Computer games. New media. Writing. Science fiction stories. Pornography. The Internet. They're obssessions. And like the good obsessive, I have a hard time pulling away, even mentally, from the objects of my obsession.

And more often than not, this propensity can propel me away from what others may consider ‘important’. Which is probably why I find blogging so forgiving, if I stick to a few simple ground rules — ground rules I learnt from my first few years in my first participatory medium — USENET.

Do-It-Yourself Thinking

When you get down to it, you often write for yourself. It is, in a restricted sense, the same when you get down to blogging, or journalism, or non-fiction work, or fiction-writing, or any endeavour that requires even a smidgen of creativity.

You do it for yourself.