whoa!

[click picture]

I dropped into a hole, a well, a bottomless pit, a chronosynclastic infundibulum... worlds upon worlds of amazingly banal bloggers. I'm amazed. Flat amazed. I'll just mention one.

She was struggling with watercolor, and had been for three years, chronicling each piece almost every day. She'd not improved. She kept posting about how after she'd uploaded the picture she noticed the flaws, dutifully pointing them out, almost as if one might need the help. It was always that she noticed them only after she uploaded them. Three years and almost no grasp of perspective... and this stultifying habit of sticking to this strange form of dishonest honesty.

Did she truly not see these egregious problems before she uploaded their images to her blog? For three years? No. She wanted to post them. She loved them and wanted to post them, but didn't want to admit it. There were about six other women from all over the world who regularly said fantastically supportive things about paintings seriously no better than I can do and I've only painted three watercolors in my entire life! They all had their own incarnations of this sort of blog, said things like "blessed be" and generally did entirely better with their daily uninteresting posts. But I'm rattled by this one of them. Maybe because she's nearby.

Her picture puts her in her mid-thirties. But I think she's older than that. She lives about a forty-five-minute drive from here, which is practically next door in these parts, and comes here to paint my beach sometimes. I mean, I wouldn't recognize it unless she mentioned it, but outright unbelievably, she was just here perpetrating it a couple days ago. And then she took the thing and scanned it into her computer and uploaded it to Blogger and put in the text about just now noticing the horizon drooping precipitously on the left and the lupines are really blue and not mud-colored.... I'm actually speechless and these words are just pixelated accidents....

[That second to the last word is purposely spelled that way. It's a pun. I'm still reeling.]

She never interacts with these supporters on her blog. She must comment on theirs. I didn't check. I was just amazed by her marble-sized cosmos, and she's a painter. There was a guy who was stuck on schadenfreude, and had been for years. There were only spam comments on his blog. There was a guy who covered every nuance of fishing in short secret jargon clips. There were rafting addicts who were pissed off their compatriots would only meet for this once a month. I completely fearlessly dropped down the unplumbed depths, visited lots and lots of blogs, and not one of them showed any real awareness of the world out there, or even in here. There are hordes of people who are masters of staying on topic! It's boggling! Oh. My. God.