BLOGGERS IN NEED OF HELP

It’s a disease. It’s an addiction. When we are thinking rationally, we know we should walk away from our laptop computers and live a normal life. But then inexplicably, unaccountably, we are drawn back into the sucking vortex of blogging.

We know it’s unnatural. Like the movie, Groundhog Day, we’re stuck on December 1, destined to write an on-line Christmas letter to friends and relatives over and over and over again. We know we can’t write those long Christmas letters and put them in the mail every three days all year long. That would be irrational—mentally unstable. Certifiably cuckoo.

So instead, we blog. Worldwide, there are over 200 million of us, blogging about our lives and thoughts. Statistically, there are 1.5 billion internet users across the world, so each blogger averages about 7 readers. Since Pioneer Woman has 2 million visits a month and Paris Hilton’s blog garners about 300,000 hits a day, that makes the average audience for the rest of us to be closer to 2.7 readers.

Almost every blogger wants to stop blogging. We write a blog, read it later, cringe in embarassment, and vow to give up blogging forever. For many bloggers, it takes two or three days before the urge strikes anew. Some can hold out even longer—maybe a week or two.

Photo: www.bestweekever

But like an alcoholic or a drug addict or a two-pack-a-day smoker, bloggers need a fix; so it’s back to the laptop. Our fingers shake, sweat collects on our upper lip, and our eyes furtively seek something to blog about: an orange shag carpet, a dust bunny under the bed, moldy cheese in the refrigerator, belly button lint. We know it’s only a matter of time before we’re homeless, unwashed, slouched on a park bench, with our only worldly possession—our laptops—concealed in a crumpled brown paper bag on our laps.

I understand there’s a Bloggers’ Anonymous support group out there somewhere. I even Googled it to try to find out when the next group meets or if there’s a support group in a town near me. I feel the shakes coming on again, that armpit sweat collecting, that light-headed, aura-like feeling that comes over me when I know I’m going to weaken and blog.

Would my 2.7 readers please get together and organize an intervention? Hopefully, that will succeed and I’ll be able to stop this madness. At the very least, a blogging intervention would provide a new subject to blog about the next time I get the shakes and need a fix.