Where the hell I’ve been.

There is no such thing as a typical blog, just as there is no such thing as a typical book or a typical movie. There are all sorts of blogs out there. Photo blogs, rants, fashion blogs, food blogs, humour blogs, and on and on and on. Over the past few months, I have tried my hand at a couple of those. I’ve done a photo-post. I’ve done a fashion post. I’ve even tried my hand at a cooking-post. And now it’s time to try something new. A “Where the hell I’ve been” post.

Gulag Zen

My wife has a bit of a flair for the dramatic. Years of chronic drug abuse have left her emotionally unbalanced. This morning, I woke to find her standing fully clothed at the foot of the bed.

“I”, she said, fixing me with an unnervingly level stare, “am going out!”

“What’s up? Have we run out of milk?”

“No. I am going out. For the day. Alone.”

“But what abou….”

“I”, she cut in, “am going now.”

“Are you taking the ki…”

“ALONE!” her voice cracked like a whip and she was gone.

A Dedicated Follower of Fashion

I have resolved to get the full benefit of the WordPress blogging experience. This means that every now and then, I will step out of my comfort zone and try a new type of post. So far, I have done a deep and meaningful poetry post (People wept. Marriages were saved. Complicated teenagers selected the choicest lines to write in their journals.), and a rather technical photography post (this one was more for the experts than the common people, but I have noticed a subtle improvement in the quality of the pictures on WordPress since then. Coincidence? You decide).

Now it’s time to try something new. A fashion post. I have noticed that there is an entire subculture out there in WordPress-land who love to tell the world what sort of pants they are wearing. I feel left out. None of you have ever known what sort of pants I’ve been wearing. Mercifully, that is about to change.

Crashing back down to Earth.

Today started out very well indeed. I had posted on my blog just before going to bed, and checked my stats first thing in the morning. I thought WordPress was broken, because I had over a hundred views. It turns out that I had been Freshly Pressed by the happiness engineers.

For those of you I have just lost, the happiness engineers are the shadowy, sinister organisation that controls the blogging world. Think of them as a slightly more cheerful version of the thought police from George Orwell’s 1984. If your blog is not quite positive enough, they might just pay you a little visit.Freshly Pressed is a page where they put up the very best blog posts in each category. The categories today included neuroscience, books, fatherhood and civil liberties. Mine was the very best in the shoplifting category. The other three shoplifting posts were just not up to scratch.

How to drive traffic to your blog.

I started this blog because my wife made me jealous. I was spending my evenings watching lumberjacks on the history channel (I know, I don’t get it either!) while she connected with the world. I was really enjoying it, too, until my mother asked me how I was going to make any money from it. I wasn’t. I was doing it for the affirmation one can only get from having complete strangers like what one was doing. Or rather “like” what one was doing.