Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Whether tis nobler in the mind...

To be mainstream or alternative, is what you should have been pondering. For you see, Hamlet, my good fellow, you messed up and messed up big time. The question of being or not being is trivial. You have to be. Without being, you may as well be dead.

And people who aren’t, are almost guaranteed of being forgotten as soon as they are off the page and out of the mind. The page, in this case, is not necessarily an actual page — of the paper or virtual variety. It could be in a relationship, for all you know. You may be forgotten without a second though by someone you considered a friend, if you choose not to be (by be, I’m not sure exactly what I mean, but vaguely, being something... something memorable).

Being forgotten is one of the worst things around; far worse than being written off, I’d go as far as to say. To write someone off is to claim that what they can offer is not worthwhile, but to forget, is almost to make it seem like it never was.

In the true tradition of The View, I digress.

Returning to my point, To be mainstream or to be alternative? That is the question. For something as vast as this, let’s narrow it down and keep it simple so the most of me and the least of you understands. Let’s look at the blogosphere. I concede I’m a fairly unremarkable blogger. The sight of someone saying, “Yes, that’s what I was thinking” when they read the contents of a post I’ve blasted up on this here site, comes as a happy surprise to me and makes me smile. But for the majority of the time, my blog slips under the radar. Fair enough, it is not your usual pack of rants... ermmm... most of the time.

And I can assure you that you are some of the minutely few people who take the time to read it. Even fewer of you take the time to pick my rants to the roots of their origin (not saying I’m dying to be interpreted or anything). This is not a blog that racks up 40 plus hits a day.

What perturbs me most is that the fact that it isn’t racking up those kinda hits after being around since 2007... doesn’t seem to bother me all that much. A lack of killer instinct? A false pretext of being the alternative to the mainstream? I’m not sure. I do know that I struggle to write for an audience. My boss knows this. But surely, a few more hits wouldn’t kill. Throw in some Bollywood, some “how fucked up the world is” or alternatively, a dash of “how pretty my morning is and everything around me too”. That’ll get more hits,... (maybe).

But where would that leave me? Would I feel any happier? You can bet your entire life savings — for most of the readers who come to this here blog, that isn’t a whole lot, so let’s change that. You can rob seven banks and beat up an old woman on the way and bet your entire bounty that I would not feel an iota of a difference. Why?

Why? Because The View lets me pepper you, the readers with this kind of a pointless and meandering tirade, with zero accountability for me to bear. Ultimately, the reading of this stuff is your burden to bear. And I wouldn’t cha-...

(You see? I don’t even have to complete my blog. Being in the alternative bracket of genre-allocation kicks ass!)