At the same time, pasting together these various ideas seemingly represents the chaotic, pluralistic, or information-drenched aspects of postmodern society. I think you have made art. How do I know? How do we know when I thing becomes art? When we walk away from it and set it loose into the world, despite our best intentions to “finish” or “polish” or “make-right” it goes and does things we might never have intended, for better or worse.

At least, common among those bloggers who actually THINK.

Sometimes I know that stepping away from the computer is the best thing to do. Sometimes I know that writing in a real journal, with a real pen, is the appropriate way to write. Sometimes I make lists of blog fodder. Sometimes I actually feel obligated to blog.

Overall, I think blogging serves a purpose, depending on the individual. I cannot speak for you, but for me, I consider it an art — one that I am continually reflecting upon and scrutinizing, one that I am thankful for. But it will never be the same as my journal, as my pen.

Maybe it’s as dated as saying synergy; but synchronous, for sure; because just yestiddy after the B’s first day back at school, we talked about his early teaching idealism that he was doing a good thing, and his current belief 20 years later that it’s not that he’s doing a BAD thing, but an acceptance that he’s just doing a thing, and it has its own agenda for itself.

Actually I should let him explain this, it occurs to me. I’m in no shape to do it justice; as I said in my ticket to Dreamhost this afternoon: “With every hour my site is down, I become slighly less rational and slightly more unhinged. And believe me when I assure you that I wasn’t very hinged to start with.”

I can however speak about the lyric impulse. Like you I view the idea of an authorial zero-sum game with distaste. Yet gettin’ empirical means observing and describing the phenomenon: that when I am writing prose, I don’t write poetry. It happened at the Alt Weekly; it happened during the final stages of the Dying Book; it invariably happens during an academically preoccupied semester. I try not to think of it in terms of a finite number of words being competitively used up or drained, but instead as a case of, perhaps, two noisy hemispheres. When the left side is chattering wildly, as it likes to do, it’s hard to hear the right, and her almost inaudible voice at the best of times.

I equate it as well with the feeling of stopping during the first days of a sesshin. It’s pretty brutal. Your body has been plunked down more or less in one place but your brain is still going 180 mph with its hair on fire. You didn’t even know you were going 180! You thought you were pretty mellow! Ha ha ha.

So here you are slamming on the brakes and there’s a giant mental collision as the mind (Lefty, maybe) frantically sorts and compares and fusses and ruminates and worries and offers up a dozen hysterical entertainments per second. “What about this?! OMG, this! Big problem! Get up, do something, don’t just sit there! Danger, Will Robinson–” etc.

Around day 3-5 you really think you will go completely insane. Actually, you’re pretty convinced you ARE insane. Plus it is TEH back pain. And then there is a terrific silent exploding sound in your head; and then, as the late dear Bob Winson said, you float around thinking, “This is how man was meant to live!”

Sometimes. Sometimes it just blows, pretty much the whole time.

My point is…what is my point. I have no blog.

Right, that’s my point–I have no blog for 48 hours now and hey, I’m definitely not writing poems! So it’s never a one-on-one causal variable. I just know certain faeries are super-shy. Melody and lyric especially. If I want to write songs, I can’t listen to other people’s music. It just drowns out the delicate tentative ones who come and tug on your sleeve, and if you don’t bend down and listen gravely RIGHT AWAY that’s it: they dart off: you had your chance. And if I’m being very social, being very public and presentational and performative with my writing, also: no faeries. They have the good sense to stay away when no one is listening to them.

Because why would they waste their droplets on the desert?

And another thing [blogart alert!]. The arts happen, for me, right directly ON the media, through handling it and fooling around with it. You know, you can only “plan” a painting to a certain degree. So composing music comes through the interaction with an actual instrument; cooking creatively happens when you wander into the kitchen and peer in the crisper to see what needs to get used before it smells any funnier; and poems are all about paper and ink, for my Luddite self (no flarf on me). And again, if I’m doing one thing (keyboard) I’m not doing something else (ink). The zero-sum, if it’s anywhere, is in my finitude. If that’s a word. Which I doubt. Per Philip Levine’s distinction between poetry eternal and poetry temporal. I’m in this temporal body and I have about 16-18 hours in a waking day, in which to do various behaviors. And if I’m doing one, I’m not doing the others. Like how, if you’re watching TED, you’re not reading books? Incarnation’s a drag sometimes.

Perhaps having multiple blogs instantiates the desire to bilocate….

Pyewacket is rubbing her fishy little face against mine, so I think it’s time to SHUT UP and let you have your blog back. Love! <3