y'all can't all be wrong: SOTW Vol 5: World Blog On

Artist: Mike Keneally & Beer for Dolphins
Song: Kedgeree
Album: Dancing
Year: 2000

One million-plus registered users on Blogger and I'm telling myself, blog-this or blog-off -- the world surely doesn't need one million and one blogs. Especially, especially in light of Cristina Nehring's very recent Harper's Magazine article, "Our Essays Ourselves" (Harper's, May 2003) which severely questions the autobiographical banality of the modern essay. Even more especially that a Google search on this essay yields results that only includes blogs. Further damning is that one of those blogs cites a line that I wanted to use for this essay:

No detail strikes these writers as too small or too banal to include: if they noticed it, it's important...

That even writers as formidable as Frazier and McPhee have yielded to such pedestrian rehearsals is testimony to the pettily autobiographical frenzy that has lately seized American essayists -- a frenzy for cozy, complacent, and oddly insular self-revelation that has swallowed them up in numbers.

So, for every blog that's out there, there are easily ten reasons it should desist. Combine that with Nehring's article and I had nearly enough reason for me to scrap the "y'all can't all be wrong" blog before I even made my first post. But, as I assembled my blog and pondered over such things as which shade of gray is the coolest or whether to use horizontal or vertical menus -- I happened upon a few sites that propelled me forward:

The being jennifer garrett blog provided instant comfort to my fears of bombarding the world with insipid details of my life (like those shades of gray I just mentioned). The "being jennifer garrett" description is "Everyday an adventure in mediocrity," and I'm thinking hey, there's at least one blogger out there who isn't trying to fool anybody. In fact I created a word for this: derationalized. So if "being jennifer garrett" is the first derationalized blog, perhaps "y'all can't all be wrong" will be the second?

Moreover, I didn't create my blog in a quest for greatness, nor did I create it to disseminate dull personal details. I did it because I felt I had no choice in the matter -- it was borne from the essence of incitement. There's a great Molière quote that is also found on the "being jennifer garrett" blog:

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.

My journals and thousands of letters and emails prove my love for writing. "y'all can't be wrong"/Song of the Week is for my few close friends (except for the few who sent me hate mail for spamming them). If I never get to the prostitution stage -- I'm OK with that.

However, even with the puerile posts that tend to litter the blog and bulletin board lands, there are still a lot of great posts that exist -- even those that disregard grammar and phrasing (for a blog, this is OK). There are words and there is meaning. The world stops when meaning doesn't prevail over words. I found this bulletin post by a person with a screen name of Coonass. Now, if someone with the name of Coonass can lay down some soul piercing words of thanks like he or she did in the post, then I say, world blog on.

Furthermore, blogging lends itself to mutual but isolated discovery. I adore this post from the kottke.org blog: Jason's rules for the NYC subway. Now, when it comes to cars, I've seriously squelched my road rage and have been evolving into one of those right-laners who never passes anybody (though the turbo doesn't get lost in the city driving). But when it comes to me, the pedestrian -- look out -- I've got serious sidewalk rage. Elevators and doors: out first, then in. Walking on stairs or sidewalks: stay right. Cars: don't jump a light to make a left hand turn 'cause you're going to hit me and I'm going to be pissed. Of course, I don't need to say these things because they are mentioned on the kottke.org blog. Like Jason says, "Get the hell out of my way, I'm coming through," -- lord have mercy, and world blog on.

Finally, blogs are a great source of inspiration and cross-pollination. Slightly more than a year ago I had a brief but motivating dialogue with Jen Leo, the blogger for written road blog. Jen had answered a query I had about Tim Cahill, and through the course of a few emails she encouraged me to write, if not even start my own blog. At that time I had no idea what a blog was. One year later, I have my own.

Now that my blog, "y'all can't all be wrong," is a viable entity, my Song of the Week (SOTW) series will be a subset of it. The two are coupled this week via a David Lynch quote that I found on the Mike Keneally & Beer For Dolphins website:

When you talk about something -- unless you're a poet -- a big thing becomes smaller.

Lynch's words contain admonition and encouragement and as I blog on to wherever it takes me, I'll will leave them on the tip of my conscience.

As for the music of SOTW Volume 5, it's one of those songs that picks you up and gives you encouragement to move forward. Even when you know that there are 6 billion blogs in the world and that every task, in the end, will be defeating. The chorus of the song is something you'd want to hear going into the last turn of an 800-meter race knowing full well you were going to win. Sonic triumph.

In a derationalized state I realize there isn't anything "y'all can't be wrong" can say that hasn't already been more effectively said. Shit, 50 pages into Hesse's Steppenwolf, I found enough literary genius to make me want to stop writing altogether. Not that Hesse's level couldn't be achieved, but that would be mundane redundancy. That's not the right path. Fortunately, Hesse outlined the right one in Demian:

... each man has his 'function' but none which he can choose himself, define, or perform as he pleases. I was wrong to desire new gods, completely wrong to want to provide the world with something. An enlightened man had but one duty -- to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope his way forward, no matter where it led. The realization shook me profoundly ... I had often speculated with images of the future, dreamed of roles that I might be assigned, perhaps as a poet or painter or something similar.

All that was futile. I did not exist to write poems, to preach or to paint, neither I nor anyone else. All of that was incidental. Each man had only one genuine vocation -- to find the way to himself. He might end up as poet or madman, as prophet or criminal -- that was not his affair, ultimately it was of no concern. His task was to discover his own destiny -- not an arbitrary one -- and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness.