Is Blogging Dead?

And can a person die from choking on their own saliva? Maybe not, but it sure as hell feels like it sometimes! And why does it hurt so much more when my cat kneads my side fat than when he kneads my butt or thigh fat?

One of my favorite bloggers has decided to hang it up. I hope we'll stay in touch but I really don't know why she'd want to stay in touch with a curmudgeon like me. 

Last year at this time someone I considered a "forever friend" in the world of blogging gave me the old "fuck off." The two of us used to work off of each other's creations. It was really a blow when I lost that. I don't think about it all the time but it still hurts me.

This July a couple of people that I'd once been stupid enough to consider friends betrayed me big time. I've decided that they're both pathetic, but it obviously still bothers me.

I think that people these days would rather Tweet and Facebook. Twitter is fucking impersonal. I have an account, but I hardly ever use it. Ditto Facebook. For as much as it's supposed to bring people closer, a lot of the people on there just seem snarky at best. I'm not particularly fond of it.

I know--I should get out there and "meet real people." But neither my personality nor my lifestyle is very amenable to that. And the "real" people I meet tend not to get me anyway. 

I'll probably keep blogging anyway. I just need to get over the idea that anyone will actually read it.

It sometimes baffles me that for as much as the Internet COULD bring people together, it seems more like a desert scattered here and there with lonely hovels than a real community. Which is kind of how "real life" seems too. 

Even when I was a little tiny child, I related to this song. I have always been so lonely, always hoped to find friends who understood me, thought that blogging would at last lead to that, and have given up. Nobody will ever understand.

You may have noticed but you probably didn't

Faycin doesn't blog much any more

There's really no reason to

Because nobody cares

Keep it Simple, Shithead

Inside

I wish I had someone to talk to

I wish someone cared

OCD Crazees

When I get stuck in the obsessively checking email-blogger-facebook repeatedly for communication, I know it's time to step off and do something else! My fiction writing persona is almost done with a new story for submission to an anthology but couldn't write with the contractor here today. So off I go to beg leftovers from my son the college student. Summer breaks suck for college. In the spring and fall college students get a week, but in the summer it's only a day, and that's only if Fourth of July falls on a weekday!

I also need to register to take my NCLEX. So time to quit fucking around already!

What is most challenging about blogging?

The writing prompts are found here. I'm not allowed to be a participating member any more but I use them anyway occasionally.

What I find most difficult about blogging is the fact that I'm too honest about what I really am. I create new personas and try not to be quite so straight forward in the hopes that I'll attract an audience, but it never works. The real me always comes out. And that's never good.

I'll never be one of these people that has a hundred followers.

Hell, I'd be shocked if I ever had ten.

So the most challenging thing about blogging is the discovery that I'll never be good at it, or anything else. 

And that I'm stupid enough to keep doing it anyway.

Haunted and Empty

A Lonely Universe

Here are the writing prompts from one of those blogs that I haunt or stalk or whatever it is I do. I use these but I can't directly participate anymore. Trying to work with "normal" humanity simply does not work for me.

1.) Six Word Memoir: Write about a significant time in your life in just six words.

My father died. I lost faith.

2.) “One need not be a chamber to be haunted, One need not be a house. The brain has corridors surpassing material place”. -Emily Dickinson What haunts you?

Oh people. A fuck of a lot of things haunt me. One of the things that haunts me daily is due to the work (what little I am able to do) that I do to try and end animal cruelty. I see the images in my head of animals that were murdered in horrible ways by sick human beings who deserve to have THE WORST happen to them. I do not want to hear about the milk of human kindness when it comes to these shits. I have none. They deserve THE WORST. That is that. I will not belabor it.

The thing that haunts me on a personal level is my loss of faith. I do not enjoy being an out and out atheist even though "it makes the most sense" to me. It feels utterly empty and devoid of hope.

I could never go back to being one of the devout, believing in a deity who sees fit to reject certain of its creations because they are unable to believe in its existence. I have no use for such a deity. Such flaws as needing to be constantly worshiped are human vices, and any deity worth its salt would have no such neediness. Therefore, I am quite unlikely to be "born again" into that religion. 

Reason tends to outweigh the necessity of escaping the fear of eternal oblivion.

And now, to up my Pariah Points all the further.

I do miss being able to believe in the deities of the older pantheons. I like them. I did at one point believe they existed and that they heard me. I have had experiences which point to the fact that SOMETHING happened when I have done what amounts to focusing my energy on a certain ideal. I do have some belief in connecting with a universal energy and obtaining feedback from that energy. Energy is the one thing that I can be sure of. It is eternal. It never ceases to exist, it only changes form.

Using a scientific thought process, I also believe in the POSSIBILITY that some portion of the personality survives the death of the body. The ENERGY that exists within the body does not cease to exist on the death of the body. It goes somewhere. It does something. And yeah, motherfuckers, I did once see a 100% 3D actual ghost with my unstoned, undrunk, not particularly tired eyes. It was not a flash in my peripheral vision, it--rather, he--sat there in his favorite chair, right smack in front of me. For a full 30 seconds to a minute he was there, until his wife opened the door and he disappeared. There were plenty of physical phenomenon preceding his appearance--slamming of doors in the basement, the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Yes, I have a history of mental illness. No, I do not hallucinate unless I am on drugs, either legitimate or otherwise, or I am so tired that I begin hallucinating. This happened last night when I "saw" a black dog crossing the street and nearly crashed the car to avoid hitting it. I'd not had more than six hours of sleep in the past three days.

This was not the case when I saw the ghost. Who, if you aren't familiar with this story, had been my neighbor. He died at 35 from leukemia. I was babysitting for his son at the time I saw him.

This ghost does not haunt me. It's likely he doesn't even come back to that house any more. His wife remarried, his son is is now almost 40 years old. Neither of them live there any more.

My failures haunt me. My  loneliness haunts me. The loss of people I thought were my friends but who decided that I was "too weird" to be worth their friendship haunts and hurts me. Every time this sort of thing happens I feel more and more worthless.

Perhaps for right now, "maybe" needs to be good enough, seeing as none of us really knows the score about why we even exist or what happens when our bodies die. I always enjoyed exploring these mysteries. Such as, why do some people (like my father, although my mother has heard his voice on several occasions since he died, always at a quarter to seven in the morning) leave and not return to haunt their loved ones, while others come back.

An Australian Aboriginal would find the idea that the soul does not continue existence after death ludicrous. I feel that it is unscientific to not be open to possibilities when we have no proof one way or the other. 

Other haunts: 

Again, my failures in life. To be completely broke, to have no friends, to live in squalor, all these things bring my soul down as low as it can go.

I need something...badly.

I need for this misery to end.

Well, I'm not as suicidal as I was a few hours ago. I guess that's something, maybe.

Now, why can't good luck come and haunt me?

Bad Writer or Bad Fit?

I thought that I might bring new readers to my blogs by participating in the Writer's Workshops but I don't think I'm going to do it anymore. Most of the participants are Normals, and I'm an Anything But Normal. People are afraid of those with mental illness. They believe the hype about us all being violent and having deluded thoughts and thinking that the government has implanted spy devices in our tooth fillings. I have three fillings, so I guess the FBI, the CIA, and the ATF all get to spy on me.

I don't have deluded thoughts so much as deluded moods. My brain tries to kill me on multiple occasions throughout the year. I have to fight the urge to give in and finally end my pain. I'm not depressive all the time but people don't get my sense of humor either. Just trying to stay alive, folks. But every time I try to venture into Normal World, if I don't get outright scorned I get the old silent treatment. People hide when they see It coming. 

Really, I'm not too surprised. But I'll give the people what they want, and I'll stay away.

Where is my anti-loneliness pill?

The pills work fairly well to combat the severe irritability that made me so impossible to live with.

They don't make the urge to cut go away but they make me strong enough so I can tell it to shut up.

But they don't combat the loneliness.

I wish that I would see personal emails in my inbox.

I wish that someone might call me.

I wish I had the courage to follow up on seeing if that EVP fellow could get anything from my father.

I wish I still believed in anything.

But I just don't any more.

And I am very, very alone.