I'm Just Going To Pretend...

...pretend I am still in Paris, and that I've been reliably posting a new entry every day for the past 3 weeks.

EUROCHINO, (EURO and not PARIS or FRANCOCHINO or something, because Dear Wife's continued research will be moving us to other European locations), was created to be a sort of online travelogue for friends and family. Sounds boring, does it? It is boring, apparently, because all of our immediate family convened for this post-holiday holiday, (a holiday that Dear Wife and I are still enjoying--a vacation from our vacation, we like to call it), and we learned they'd all barely glanced at EUROCHINO, the gift I thought I'd been giving them for Xmas. Back in good ol' 2005 (how long ago it seems already!), I'd been hesitating over every entry, knowing my mom might be reading it--or my father-in-law. Well, now I know better.

This news frees me up considerably.

I am no expert on blogs, or blogging, and anymore I can hardly stand to log onto one because I'm sure it'll be better than mine--and if not better, than certainly more popular. In this thickly settled blogosphere, a humbling experience is just a click away. There was a period of time not so long ago when the number of blogs and bloggers seemed roughly approximate to the size of an intelligible world, a place where you might not know everyone, but everyone seemed knowable: there were those two guys that did the animation blog, there was the girl in Paris, that guy in the Mountain Goats that did a tour diary, the nanny in New York, etc.... it all had the amiable scale of a 19th Century mid-sized city: an unexpectedly reassuring resurrection of this nostalgic notion of "a city," as opposed to a "community," (community implying homogeneity, i.e., "the animation community," or "The Bedouin community," whereas the city is that big blanket stitching together lots of little communities--that makes sense, right?). In the by-gone days of a comprehensible blogoscape (say, June 2004), there could be found a few self-directed voices representing many broadly definable communities: the fields of endeavor and expertise were vast, but the bloggers all shared a mixture of exhibitionism, a little embarassment ("I am not a geek"), some self-consciousness, and most of all, lots of enthusiasm for their subject. Frequently the subject they were so engaged by turned out to be their own life.

Now it feels different. And it feels different because of the scale. The scale is dizzying, the ambitions of every participant noticeably grander.

It makes me feel like a castaway Charelton Heston.

Which makes me wonder about the average above-average blogger--you know, the one who's got a readership of 1,000 and an expert entry nearly every day. The ones that have that sassy insouciance down pat. I know how back-breaking it has been crafting my meager output, so I imagine this fat wave of wow sites comes from a new breed of über-fecund authors. They must all share a very particular psychological/spiritual make-up, one unlike mine. Maybe it's a new sort of make-up, a new breed born of our digital age.

Sounds terrible when I put it like that, doesn’t it? But I think it’s true.

"Damn you! Damn you all to hell!"