Previously, Alex ("Green Eyes") offered to give us a ride, we took him upstairs for the same, we did it, and somehow we fell asleep. We wake up, and he's gone. We've spent the last chapter mourning him. What will we do next?
I brew coffee without further justification. I drink a cup and don't know what to do. The sun is still at it, embracing the ugly water tower, it is almost on top of it now, what's the name of this position? I should take pictures for my blog, and mention in the post that the tower resembles—better is—is an ugly frog, how do we say, ‘in attendance,’ ‘in expectation,’ ‘in dire need of,’ what, ‘relief,’ ‘transmogrification,’ that word possible doesn't exist, ‘transcendence,’ perhaps. I could perhaps use an older trick, insinuating lightly that the tower is, in reality, a spaceship, which is now awaiting trans-whatever into an ugly frog. We're not getting anywhere. My blog, that's the blog that could have saved me if I would only have shown it to Alex, (or ‘showed’ it to Alex?) so that he could have liked it, and liked me more, and leave his number behind, I’m repeating myself.
My blog lives in the spare room, on the ambulant desk, in my computer (I'm still stuck with a PC). I leave kitchen and coffee behind and turn the switch. It takes forever, as you know, my PC is four years old (why did everything happen four years ago?).
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Let me see, I don't quite remember when I posted the last post, like what, three days ago? About what? I forgot as well. This blog, confusingly named Freedom Fries, is about everything and nothing, including loose talk about the gay condition, risqué pictures of the semi-graphical kind, more soft porn, it never angles more than 35° above the ground, we're barely in erection country, not because I'm prudish, but because I want to avoid a content warning, which, I fear, would discourage the last of my regulars of whose sexuality I know little. Beyond the pendulous porn, there are posts with shots at light fun of the acridic type, political posts against slavery and the Confederacy, sometimes somebody emails a new joke, I find a fitting picture, you name it. There are millions of these blogs, perhaps more than potential visitors (some guy from the computer science department told me that 20 thousand new porn sites go on line each day, I can't believe it, but then I never believe other faculty).
How to fill the void while we are starting up ('I'll show you, I'll show you, sorry it takes so long, it's always like this, I should get a new machine'). Perhaps I can tell you which new machine I'm going to buy, or ask you what to do, but I know your answer already, I should not buy a machine, but get an Ipad instead (for which I don't have the money since we're only paid during the term, and my truck needs repair work urgently), but I will explain that these things are really not practical when it comes to blogging, switching between pages for the keyboard, the picture directory, the browser (and particularly unpractical when you're no longer taking tricks home cause your short term memory has lost its adolescent touch). This explanation (why I won't use the Ipad) leaves you puzzled, right, ('the guy doesn't know anything about Ipads').
We're still waiting. Should your visitor, the person whom you've talked up for half an hour blog-wise, should your visitor now utter words like "upmarket," or "capacity," it's a sure sign that he hasn't only lost patience, he's definitely not a nice person, and you should upthrow him out, at least reconsider the whole blog-presentation, but it has already gone too far, we've already waited several minutes (or seconds), so we are throwing good money after bad money, and when the curtain finally rises, and Window's duh-daah-duh-daah sings, it's only a few more minutes (or seconds) until the browser springs to life with your blog. I'm exaggerating, of course.
You are telling your visitor that you have 80 to 100 unique visitors per day, and depending on how much he knows, he's unimpressed (he knows something), or shocked (he knows little); outsiders expect me to have millions of viewers, and sometimes somebody tries to get me to post a nasty post on some Assistant Secretary of the Environment in the expectation that this will finally change Washington's ways and keep the Confederacy intact. What you are not telling him is that eighty percent of my visits are for one single post, which also reappears as an over-sized picture at the bottom of the homepage, a picture that your straight-and-only acquaintance Nick sent you once, a hilarious bunch of naked girls, the naked girls really naked, they have hard faces and long hair, they had jobs (boobies, etc), they are pretty in a strictly technical sense, and each holds a trophy, they've must have won something (when Nick sent the picture, he added the comment "They've won, they've won, who gives a shit what"), all these girls are arranged in the middle of a trailer park while the sun is setting, still kissing the ugly water tower that is outside the picture. Anyhow, you keep these girls, because they save your ass click-wise in an unbalanced world when you have to speak about unique visits to un-unique visitors (this sentence meanders too well in its muddy delta). The world is so unfair, for every male girl-person, it contains only ooh-point-one (0.1) male boy-persons, or less. Let's say this again: per ten male girl-people, there's only one male boy-person. I can't get this straight. Male girl-person, male boy-person, it won't fly, but we would have more visitors, or wouldn't need the naked girls, if the sexual preference distribution would be fairer. Yes, folks, we are threatening the straight marriage here.
My thoughts are uninterrupted by Window's duh-daah-duh-daah, and the blog is finally awakening (terrible sentence). Do I still want to know when I posted the last post? Certainly not. It's the top post, and Blogger, the Google syndrome, automatically inserts the date (there's an option to switch it off, but it’s in the wrong place, I can’t find it). My last post was posted ten days ago. Not good. Not for the first time. If you don't post, the search engines lose interest, your visits drop off the precipice a few days later, like Wile E. Coyote, and it's hard to resurrect the score, you'll have to post like hell for at least a week to re-awaken the crawlers. The terrible blog syndrome is raising its ugly head, you're tired, tired of blogging, and not only that.
When you start playing with the settings, it could be a good sign, but it's usually a bad sign. We shouldn't only change our ways party-wise, and get laid more, and meet new friends, and marry Alex, we should also change something about the blog. Its content perhaps? Doing the opposite of what we are doing? Or at least improve the presentation, the whole set-up, it hasn’t changed in four years, the world has moved on.
The settings. You can set everything. Fonts, sizes, colors, appearance, keeping up appearances (doesn't fly). OK, now, where do you do that, change the settings? On the Dashboard. Where's the dashboard? You haven't used the dashboard in quite a while. Four weeks, three weeks, and you've completely forgotten about the whole thing, as if you're under a big hang-over. Once we're on the dashboard, you can Get Started, provided you click the right button. There's always the option to start a new blog immediately, it takes less than 30 seconds, people have so much to say. Get started, no, that was not it. Overview, then, the next button. You click overview, and you get a new page with new buttons for "Layout," "Template," "Settings," etc. Layout, right? Click, no, Layout is about something else. Settings, click, fail. It must be Template. We're in Template Territory now, and the options are "Customize," or "Edit HTML."
Four years ago, when you were still in reach of distant comp-sci memories, you still had the guts to climb into the machine room where the bare metal clangs, and write HTML code. HTML. We're looking at our own HTML code now and are puzzled. Where's the manual? It's 1000 pages wide. Some people are actually inspired by their hangover when writing code, it can be done, like in the Right Stuff, where all test pilots always fly above the speed of light in a hang-over, and one explains to Tom Wolfe that ‘it can be done.' But we don't have a hang-over today, we drank only seven "units," or so, not much by recent standards. Perhaps not even, the two glasses of champagne, well, no, three, two beers at the Blue Moon, no, three, nothing in the hospital, one Alex beer. Only seven units. We're completely sober. So we won't do HTML today. What was the name of the alternative, we've already forgotten. Customize, right, customize. We click on "customize."
Another categorization appears, choices, choices. "Dynamic View" is first, followed by "Simple," "Picture Window," AwSome Inc," and something else. Dynamic View, we don't remember that one in particular. Well, let's see. We click on "Dynamic View." A pop-up appears momentarily, displaying your blog in new ways, but the window is shaded, as is the wont of pop-ups these days, so you don't see enough. "Apply to blog?" an inviting button asks in orange, next to a whitish one yelling "Cancel!" You'd like to know now how your blog would look like under the Dynamic View, right, so you click Apply to Blog. Nothing happens for a while. Finally, the wheels of patience appear, two little cogwheels, turning in opposite directions, one larger than the other, embracing each other (to the extent that cogwheels can do that), they must be in love. Nothing happens for a while, the wheels still making love.
Then, all of a sudden, the wheels die the liebestod, the screen yields a flicker, and a casual text in the upper left corner reads in unassuming Times New Roman, without further embellishments, or icons, or anything else, there's just one large white page (white as #FFFFFF), where your blog used to be, it reads, "Service unavailable, Error 503." We've seen this before, so we click on the renew page icon on the navigation bar that bites itself in the schlange. "Not found, Error 404," Blogger replies helpfully. You try again. Repeat failure. You go to the bookmark bar where your blog link is bookmarked for convenience. You click on the little "FF" (Freedom Fries) falvicon that you designed in better days. "Not found, Error 404," is the answer. You have this page on the menu bar with your most urgent links, including your blog link. You try there. "Error 404," the browser comes back. You try different browsers. Chrome, Firefox, even Explorer. You type the link, "http://morefreedomfris.blogspot.com."
Blogger comes back in a better mood now, no more tired Times New Roman, but the font of the day, colors, flags, offers for help, plus the orange- colored button-offer to register morefreedomfris immediately ("Start the blogs, start the blogs!"). A typo of course. A retype. Do we want to register morefreedomfrie? No, we don't, we retype more carefully. What was the word for it, Urban's Dictionary's word of today, Insomnia dyslexia, wasn't it (I kid you not). No more typos this time. We're back to square I-don't-know-what, the white page, Error 404. It's the same in all browsers. Freedom Fries, my blog, is unaccessible, unavailable, frozen. Like Alex. Futsch, gone, dead.
The phone rings.
You are still there? Then you will possibly like the book. It's out now, available on Amazon, here:
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