on blogger, on dancer

it's hard not to feel like an asshole when posting a blog. it's not just that the masses are always wrong (though i often suspect as much, or act as if i do), but more a deep skepticism that anything offered on such a promiscuously vast scale could be in any way valuable. or in any way unique: a million other bloggers will push "Publish" when i do at the end of this. in a room filled with that many monkeys at typewriters, you still won't get Hamlet, but you just might get this blog entry.
it's my second blog in a week, after a half century plus of non-blogging. i wonder if this time, too, the walls will whisper "ass...hole."
if it happens too often i'm bound to quit.
there's the sense i have, too, that all internet functions beyond personal emails (and even those in certain spectral-paranoid phases) serve above all corporate commercial interests, either explicitly or implicitly. a billion bloggers served.
but a predilection for non-joining...like some kind of anti-salmon that has to exhaust itself, turn off its self-survival juices, to swim with a current...may not have much to do with reason or logic. its promptings may be purely temperamental. may be congenital for all i know.
the only undeniable fact is that when i see a line forming anywhere, an urge that envelops my toes and what's left of my hair and all points in between pushes me hard in the other direction. any other direction. the urge can be fought; i have fought it, often. usually with a line-joining inner wail of "wrong...wrong...wrong..."
is it wrong? the jury has heard testimony either way.
but the urge, like the dude, abides. i first read charles bukowski in german, in a smeary little german magazine, in a little german town where i visited a fathomless blue pool fed by an underground spring and what was left of the Dachau concentration camp. i came back to canada and began hand-copying and then typing out bukowski poems from his first chapbooks that i found in, and couldn't remove from, the rare books section of McMaster's library. i thought i was the only person in the world reading this stuff. i'd hopped a freight train and had it all to myself. but long before i saw people wearing bukowski tee shirts, i knew it was time to get off.
similar examples abound and could be multiplied ad infinitum (and "Published"). i've enjoyed listening to panel discussions on occasion, but the couple of times i've been on one, i've known without a doubt that there was more action--and perhaps even more wisdom--in the nearest coatroom.
it could be called pathologic as well as temperamental. it has been called both.
but the merits of queue-joining are documented too. when i accompanied my first girlfriend to our high school graduation dance, i had no doubt i was joining a bleak march of clowns--i couldn't tell her this, which was part of my/our problem--whose pageantry was the tics of pure senselessness: pinning the corsage under teary-savage parental eyes, driving the borrowed buick that mocked me mercilessly, the wet-towel-snapping doofus crowned as king, his busty brainless queen, the sadistic french teacher in a checkered suit...but
--and this is a but the size of the blessed blogworld itself--
...that evening ended making out (the first time for both of us) on the thawing grass of a reservoir, stiff cold grass atop the immense sloshing vaults that fed the city's taps, unfastened and shoved-aside rented fabrics and gasps and hilarious laughter at the dance floor shuffling that, for a few hours at least, provided all the redemption high school needed (which was tons)...and proved that, catatonic-sweating rides in buicks aside, alien assholes from 5 years of corridors suddenly your pals aside, we had a present and even a future (a brief one) that was glorious.
but i don't think we could have got to the reservoir without the dance.
(that may be a failure of imagination on my part or it may actually be the case. the jury's still out on that one, too...)