This is Odafin Domuola, I won him from one of those claw machines on Saturday night when we went to see The Avengers at City North! I have never won anything from one of those machines ever. I love him.
I used to eat lunches, not every day, at Perry's Deli, where you could get this jenga creation of corned beef and roast beef and coleslaw and cheese and Russian dressing and rye bread, pilot your piled high tray around the gabbling tables of financial analysts with their ties flung over their shoulders, find a counter seat by the window and look at the line going down the block as you unhinged your jaw around your lunch. The din was unbelievable, Perry would come out every once in a while and ring a bell for everybody to shut up and listen to the trivia question, and for a few minutes after the trivia question had been asked and answered you could hear yourself think, and eventually it would rise to a din again and then Perry would ring the bell again.
My blog breaks are like that. Or you know, any kind of break is like that. With the blog, well, this blog is supposed to serve as a sanctuary for my verbosity, so I don't muck up the commons, i.e. Facebook, with my every single random thought. But also it's a sanctuary with a stats counter that I can't help looking at, I can't help getting excited when my daily hits bloop up from a hundred to a hundred and fifty to two hundred per day, though this month has tanked a bit, and though I understand this is really small potatoes in the blogosphere. Which I'm not supposed to care about, remember this blog is asylum not popularity contest or moneymaker, god knows... hey oh, my total earnings since starting Google AdSense are up to $11.30, I haven't checked in a while because Blogger redesigned their interface and now it's two clicks instead of just one to see your earnings, and I really am that lazy. In any case I don't get paid until my earnings reach $100.00, which at this rate will be in about twenty-six years.
Writing this blog is like anything else you do in life, you have your own idea what it's for, and then the village has all of its ideas, as in It takes a village to write a blog, which really it doesn't, if you ask me it takes the opposite of a village, but anyway the village is loud and it's hard to hear yourself think. You keep checking your stats every day and calculating whether you're on track to hit 6000 hits this month, which I'm not this month, and thinking maybe you could link to today's post from Facebook, and thinking what else like that racerback dress could you do that would inexplicably get Pinterested all over the place, and then you know it's time to ring the bell.
Because then the tail is starting to wag the dog, you know? I know there's people who actually make their living blogging, but that's not me. I want to manufacture content, I don't want to manufacture hits. Really I don't even manufacture content, do you remember the dream that Andie Macdowell tells her therapist at the beginning of Sex Lies and Videotape? The one where the garbage keeps overflowing out of the garbage can, that's my brain pretty much. All I want to do is organize the garbage. I do something with the garbage because it's there, I don't think it's great or anything. When I do get low on garbage, I panic and think about making up garbage, dude, seriously, the only thing that the garbage had going for it was that it was real. I'm not talking about non-fiction versus fiction, by the way. Fake garbage is like a decaf skim latte, why bother.
The need to ring the bell is pretty well-timed to every quarter, I take twenty days at the end of every season to not launch alla Poppy along with Gmail and Facebook when I start up my browser, and because I am that lazy, I don't click to look at it or its stats, and I can start to hear myself think. But I think I might take longer than twenty days this time, I might take the whole summer, or be on some reduced summer schedule. I've raked out all my garbage, I can see the bottom of the can...
