Decrepit Old Fool

A great quote over on Dispatches from the Culture Wars where “37-year-old amateur smartass” Ed Brayton modestly invites broadcast media to call him for interviews:

P.S. I’m not posting this to brag; I’m posting it just in case some other host or producer out there might be reading and be interested in inviting me on their show. I’ve long subscribed to HL Mencken’s description of a writer as “…a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in. His overpowering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow men , flapping his wings and emitting defiant yells. This being forbidden by the police of all civilized countries, he takes it out by putting his yells on paper. Such is the thing called self-expression.” There’s no point in pretending otherwise, or in confining one’s yelling and flapping to print.

I’m pretty sure Mencken would have understood blogging perfectly.  Each of us has a few readers whose attention encourages us to sit down at the keyboard every day. 

This isn’t to say bloggers don’t have additional motives; we might also be trying to save some little corner of the world by promoting a philosophy we feel is important for some reason.  For example, if I can prompt someone to look a little harder for the humanity in their ideological opponents, I’d think that was a good use of both writer’s and reader’s time.

But I was a class clown in school, and decades later, little has changed.  You have my sincere gratitude for stopping by to see this page, because it would just be weird to stand in an empty room flapping my arms and yelling!  (Sooner or later it would be a padded room)