Why bother?

I'm ready to roll in the parade. I've got 15 pounds of candy. I've got 250 coloring books. And I've got 2 grandsons, Zach and Jeremy, eager to toss all of that good stuff to other kids massed at the curbline along the parade route.

Since I just concluded a six-day work week, and since I've got another one due to start less than 21 hours from now, this parade thrown nto the mix means I'll be going quite a stretch without a real day off. With my season, termite season, off and running, now the battle requires that I keep my head in the game as much as keeping up on the physicality of the thing.

For instance, at the tail end of a six-day week late yesterday afternoon, a complete fool in White Haven sent me spiraling off to a very, very dark place. This is a place that causes the Markie of old to reemerge, the Markie that pummeled people just for kicks. And these days, that's simply a byproduct of being tired both mentally and physically. As I said, I need to keep my head on straight, to stay focused on the pay day prize. Thankfully, the boring ride from White Haven to Wilkes-Barre caused the overactive adrenaline pump to go into sleep mode.

During stretches such as these, it's a real chore for me to write. All of which makes me wonder about small town bloggers who post their brilliant utterances on a daily basis no matter what. No matter what. What am I to make of that? They've either got too much time on the their hands, no job, or they are devoted to an endeavor with highly questionable returns.

And I've always wondered about that, that motivation. On a case by case basis, why it is that people bother? I've questioned my own motivation in print at times, and so has another die hard known as Gort. Sometimes I wonder if some are blogging with an end result in mind. As in, the people that keep on banging a certain entitlement drum to the point of absurdity.

Or the people who promote union membership as if it's the end-all of all known end-alls, as if there are 77 virgins waiting for new brothers at the union hall. Or the (insert political party or ideology) are evil drum-beaters. They paint as dastardly villains those with a differing construct, and with a flair for the vitriolic, but at the end of the day, what did they accomplish other than preaching to the choir?

One of the greatest compliments I received about my electronic scribbling came from a guy up Wyoming way. He said something to the effect that, despite being labeled as a poliblogger, the thing he enjoyed about my older, now-mothballed site was that when he clicked on the favorites link to my site, he knew he was headed into uncharted waters.

One day it was the mayor that caught my ire, the next day I was reminiscing about trying to make each other puke down at the corner playground when I was a sprat of 8, or my fantasizing about being a redneck drinking warm home-brewed beer out back of the chicken coop in my underwear. (Opal! You hot lil' bitch!) After the political demise of our previous mayor, and after I got past the single mindedness of purpose, he said he never knew what he was in for. And he liked that.

A couple of years ago, Nancy Kman at WILK speculated about why bloggers blog, and in no uncertain terms. As part of her "Blog this!" tongue-lashing, she painted folks such as us as life's losers, the kids who couldn't get a prom date, and other mean-spirited speculation along those lines. I think she was doing what a lot of people in the accepted media did back then by dumping on the newer form of media. With corruption at work no matter where we look around here, talk radio and bloggers have become allies to some degree, albeit begrudgingly.

In response to that ill-advised rant, I wrote that the differences between bloggers and talk radio hosts are very few. They work, they play, they read too much, they generally live life, and then they reflect on all of it. I was of the firm opinion that one of us local boys set her off, but I never once remembered to ask her about it when I had her ear. But never say never.

Hey, Nancy! Who or what set you off that day?

Over the years, the one word that was always associated with my efforts was "prolific." But last year especially, that was clearly not the case. And during the holidays, it occurred to me that I went and bothered to dump the old site, I bothered to create the new site, and then I didn't bother to write much of anything. 100 or so posts for me is like taking a year off.

So after the new year, I promised myself I would bother to write again. And still, I'm not exactly sure why I feel compelled to do any of it. But as you can see during the past week, there is a direct correlation between the number of posts and the number of hours I have to work. The point is, I am no longer one of those bloggers who will blog no matter what. Work comes first, family comes second, you get the drift.

So after all of this needless circumlocuting, I am left to ask, why do you people bother? And what makes a person blog as if by rote? What's the reason for the 'another day, another post' mentality? And lastly, what do you get out of it? Why bother?

And with that, I'm off to the car wash.

Later