Long and Drawn Out with Regards to this World You’re In Now

Remember how mother always told you that honesty is the best policy? And remember when you told your boss that his comb over reminded you of your pet rat after it had been run over by the left half of spinning black rubber that kept a passing rig rolling by undaunted? I remember, because you were the guy applying for the night watchmen position at my company the next day.

Mother had a lot of happy ideas, but once we all hit the big bad real world they didn’t seem as “happy” as they did just plain foolish. So, in this so called real world, we learn early that little white lies play as important a role in keeping the earth spinning round as does the sun’s gravitational pull. That is, until one day someone somewhere had the idea to post their thoughts to the World Wide Web, a place where true personal opinion could come out with raw, unabashed flavor and without all of the sticky consequences of face to face conversation.

Years later we come out in droves to speak our little minds, typing up our latest rants or expressing our opinions on how our leaders are doing a royal job at misinterpreting the meaning of life or recanting why the rest of the people out there doing the same have “serious issues.” While on the internet we are free to have any personality we want, most likely the one we’d truly like to be tucked away inside of our trendy clothes and gelled up hairdos, but with nothing more necessary to define us other than our typed words and screen names. It is through the joy of blogging that opinions are allowed to form like seeds of the moment, change over the course of our typing them and blossom into fields of “how I see it” flowery blossoms, only to subsequently be weeded out by any passing reader in a few clicks of a mouse’s tail.

The anonymity provided with blogging has truly taken the essence of what dear old mum said about “what really matters is what’s on the inside” and finally put it to some good use. No longer must we sit in bars and hope to find like-minded people over expensive drinks and between the clacking and flapping of small talk spewing teeth and the lips that distract you from what they’re saying. We can simply click on “Next Blog,” read the first sentence, rinse and repeat. Occasionally you’ll find yourself making it to the second sentence, the third paragraph, and then well into the Archives. Here in the blogosphere we develop relationships with people before they even have a clue that we exist. Meeting our new best friends who never need to know our real names or dress sizes as we skim through the world through their eyes. Anonymity is the missing ingredient in real life, it’s the taste of a good thin filet of cod that doesn’t need any salt to ensure its maximum pleasure with everyone, because there’s no need to worry about fishy aftertaste when you aren’t obligated to swallow.

After living your second life this way, that second life that is primarily composed of only your fingers and your brain, all of the ugly fat around your hips and outdated clothing hanging from your shoulders no longer matters, and you get to explore ideas from a strictly ethereal point of view. Eventually you find yourself in the company of others who are likewise inclined to discuss and be fascinated by the things bubbling inside of your own soul, and you decide to reveal your existence to them, leaving little comments after whatever it is about their latest post you find interesting. You find out whether or not they agree with you by how they in turn reply, and if there’s no reply, well there’s also no need for an awkward silence while you stand around thinking of an excuse to leave the room. “Next Blog.”

I have, over the past several months, found myself taking up valuable company time with a cup of tea in hand and a screen full of YummyWakame.com in sight, frolicking in the plethora of quotes regarding the latest news on how best to purchase a goat for a starving family in Africa, where to find the latest spinning plastic disc that will one day house the world’s information, or simply set my eyes melting over slyly scandalous pictures of homemade socks and how they could be shipped to my door with love in less than a week. Then I began leaving comments on this site, only to find my comments were being replied to, not only by the author, creator and soothsaying mastermind behind Yummy, Mrs. Olivia Meiring, but by the amalgam of devout followers she’s managed to amass on her simple and elegant little blog. It seems that Olivia’s daily brain goo, as she refers to it, supplies a virtual beehive’s worth of followers–drones, workers and queens alike–with their regular supply of nutritious tidbits (though I’m certain that most of them exceed the 1x daily recommended dosing the site prescribes.) According to a nifty little script she has running on her page, the gathering is roughly 20 users strong at any given time, a handful of those regularly commenting on what valuable knowledge she leaves behind. They’ve come from around the globe and thanks to blogs like this one, seem to have become good friends regardless of the fact that few of them have ever seen one another out there in the real world.

This is the epitome of everything positive about globalization. If you can dismiss the downsides–Far East slave labor, union busting in the Western world, and the removal of your local neighborhood Mom&Pop’s–and look instead to one of the sole benefits, it is that we’re no longer limited to finding kindred souls in our own local taverns, but have only the limitations of how many words we’re willing to type into comment boxes, how many various blogs we’re willing to give a chance past the date and time marker. And if more blogs shared Yummy’s goal of spreading the word on what we as fatcats in our two car garage lifestyles can do to stop world hunger or send a bit of hope to the victims of the latest natural disaster, we might all go into our next lives a few karmic bits richer, or at least have our dear old mums proud of us for putting honesty at the tip top of our policies.