Even Unhappy Hipsters need blogs. Certainly people need to blog about them. Unhappy Hipsters is one of my favorite photo blogs. But unlike the hipsters themselves, that blog is not unhappy. That blog is hilarious.
I am going into my 11th month now of posting something every day to this blog. I haven’t missed a day yet since January 1 of this year. I almost called this post “Moon Over Identity Crisis,” though, because I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just stumbling along. In that regard, I am not a witch. I am you.
That said, here’s the moon I would have put at the top of this post if I had decided to make it about something else.
It was a breakfast moon. I took a picture of it when I was hunting a spider one morning. I put the pictures of the spider on the blog, but this is the first appearance of the moon, I think.
I’m not really sure, though. I’m just posting stuff at random to say I’ve done it.
I don’t have any deeply held regrets. I’ll probably even write later on about what I think I’ve learned or gained from blogging all year. Goodness knows I’ll need all the topics I can get to see me through these next two months as it now seems very unlikely I will quit before the end of December despite the fact that I’ve been threatening to quit every day all along.
What I do have instead of blog regret is blog guilt. Hence the identity crisis. Blogs (I think we think) should be some certain thing. They should be meaningful or they should be entertaining or they should be inspiring. Maybe they can be a little sad sometimes but only to illustrate some greater purpose. What they can’t be (I think we think) is just a gratuitous chronicle of normal ups and downs and upsets and misadventures and goals gone awry and real human experiences of serotonin deprivation.
In other words, this hasn’t been an easy year. My blog has been a whole lot sadder and crankier than I might have imagined when I started out. I feel bad about that. I’m not writing this blog to pull moods down as mine go down. I’m just doing this like brushing teeth. It’s something I take care of before I go to bed.
On the upside, people have been sending presents to my backache. My back got a new pillow and a new book out its appearances on the blog. I’m not the first person to write in exchange for Amazon boxes. I know that, but I’m not quite sure what to think of it. Regardless, my back is very much appreciative.
Still, the fact that I have had more frequent down periods this year than I normally do, and the fact that I have stubbornly and perhaps injudiciously blogged straight through them, makes me wonder a few things, among them, what’s wrong with that anyway? Don’t unhappy people need blogs too?
We have this social narrative that teaches us it is something approaching a sacred duty to be as upbeat and encouraging as possible at all times. Along with that is the social narrative that teaches us a failure to be happy is a failure of character. Or maybe it is a failure of loyalty to the people around you that you don’t appreciate them any better than to be sad in front of them. Or maybe it is a spiritual failure. You must not be praying enough if you are sad, some might say.
We tend to value stoicism and look down on solipsism and aren’t terribly good at distinguishing the fine lines of things that fall in between. That’s just part of what it means to live in the country that produced the happiest place on earth, which, by the way, is something of a trendy spot to commit suicide.
Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. Maybe it is a little too creepily ironic to imagine Disney suicides. Maybe it will make people feel bad. Maybe I will have to worry again that I am not doing my job of making people feel better by writing this blog.
I don’t quite know how to recover that. Maybe I could just point out that as creepy as Disney suicides are, they probably don’t apply to you since you are reading this, and they probably don’t apply to me, since I am writing this.
And so I forge on. I don’t know what I want my blog to be. I don’t know what I’m doing here. But I guess I can’t apologize for the fact that the blog isn’t quite happy. There’s a recession on. Have you noticed? The world isn’t quite happy these days. It’s okay. We can say that out loud.
I can even say it on my blog if I want.
