Having a blog is a lot like misplacing your diary at the train station or a bus stop. And by "misplacing" I mean leaving your diary there on purpose and waiting around the corner behind a pole as you watch people sit down and read it. Some people leaf through the pages while others try to pocket it. A few people won't even touch it because they have some sort of germ phobia, like those people that insist on using the paper towels from the bathroom to open the handle on the bathroom door. So you took a dump, got it on your hands while you were wiping your ass, stuck your hands under the faucet, got them wet, and then rubbed your wet feces germs all over a paper towel, and now you're using it to touch the door handle we ALL have to touch? Great. You know that you could have just used the paper towel to wipe a modicum of the wet feces OFF of your hands instead of using the paper towel to moistly transfer it the door handle, right?
Anyway, back to that diary thing... where was I? Ah, I remember. Something about leaving it at the bus station. That reminds me of the scene from The Ladies Man movie where Leon Phelps (a.k.a. Tim Meadows) encourages a lonely woman to hang out at the bus station with no panties on so she can meet a good man. Do you think there are women who do that? Ever since I watched that movie, bus stations have held a fascinating sexual allure. Maybe I'll have a sensual rendezvous at the bus station because Tim Meadows wasn't just telling a joke -- he was relating a time-tested method that sexy women have been using for centuries. They show up without panties on, and then I get to go home with them and trade sexual fluids. Maybe that's how I'll meet my future wife.
Okay, back to the analogy. Leaving the diary out for people to secretly manhandle -- that's what a blog is like if you're not getting direct feedback from online readers. I mean, people read this blog. I know they do. I see the webstats. But they don't leave comments, or link back to me from their own tedious blogs. So are they actually reading this? Or are they looking at the title, hoping for some sort of revealing photos of me at the bus stop with no panties on, and leaving when they don't find any?
Only a higher power knows. If there's one thing that religion has taught me, it's that God / gods / Jesus / Moses / Krishna / Buddha / Vishnu / Confucius / The Beatles are always watching us here on Earth, and in particular they are reading our blogs. Sort of like an omniscient group of Wikipedia editors. Except their Wikipedia is the entire Internet and the experiment is to see what happens when everyone on Earth is given the opportunity to share knowledge simultaneously. Early on, some people banded together to form a "group" to stop certain things from being put on the Internet, so the gods created Napster. Then other people formed an "RIAA" and thus the gods created the Gnutella network. And when other people joined up to start the "MPAA," the gods gave us BitTorrent. Now some people have gathered to pass the "Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act" to protect their horrid pieces of shiny plastic containing one to three hours of sequential still images (which, when shown one after the other at high speeds, create one long and continuous moving image), and the gods will give us something new. GnuTorrapster? I think so.
You're probably reading this and thinking, "What the fuck? When is this going to turn into a story about how Nick had an interview at Marvel Comics, but he showed up half an hour late and forgot to wear pants?" Well, you would be right for thinking that. That's what the first seven episodes of this column have led you to expect. And this installment is just like those others, except you're here to see history in the making this time. Instead of relating a past experience about how I wasted an opportunity to get into the comic book industry, I'm bringing you along for the ride. Every moment I spend NOT working on Time Log (my comic book currently in production) or Zombie Palin (my weekly webcomic that'll be outdated in about five to six days) is a wasted opportunity that will ultimately continue to push my dream of making comics for a living farther and farther away from me until it appears as a light at the end of a long tunnel and I won't know if I'm about to finally reach my goal or if I'm dead and the gods have come to take me away and send my remains across the information superhighway.
And that's just another reason why I'm going to have to sneak into the comic book industry if I ever want to make it in.
well that was grim.