From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXVIII

Introduction

This is the twenty-eighth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, Volume XXIII is here, Volume XXIV is here, Volume XXV is here, Volume XXVI is here, and Volume XXVII is here. I never expected my collection to be so, well, voluminous, but here we are.

So what are albertnet Bits & Bobs? They’re the closest thing to tweets or X posts you’ll ever get on albertnet, in that they’re rather short bulletins. But then, they’re nowhere nearly as short as the original 140 characters of SMS and Twitter updates. (In fact, today’s post might include one of my longest-ever Bits—or is it a Bob?— at over 500 words.) These are excerpts from letters or emails to friends and family, which I’ve decided ought to be amusing to a much wider audience (i.e., all 6 billion users of the Internet).

Since many of my friends and family probably ignored these bulletins originally, you may be the very first living human to pay them any attention! Read them all at once; one at a time over days or weeks; randomly; sequentially; capriciously; deliberately; repeatedly; not at all; or according to your own scheme that I haven’t even thought of. For each dispatch the date is provided and where I was living.

April 5, 1989 – Santa Barbara

I showed up late to my English final, and started in on the first part, which was looking at ten quotes from stuff we’d read, and identifying the work and the character quoted. Assuming (for some reason) that the exam was open-book, I started flipping through one of my books. The professor said, “Dana … what are you doing?” I was like, “Uh, just looking up one of the quotes.” The prof stated, “The identification section of this exam is not open-book.” The entire class started laughing. I said, “Uh ... sorry.” Then the whole class was on the floor. “You’ll go far in life, I can tell,” said the prof.

April 12, 1989 – Santa Barbara

Today I gave a pal a ride home from the cycling team meeting. He’s big for a cyclist—over 175 pounds, looks a bit like Bob Roll—and he was sitting on the handlebars of my mountain bike. I had the tires (Farmer John’s Cousins) at real low pressure because of an incident I suffered a couple of days ago. But that’s another story. A good one, though, so I’ll share it with you. 

It all started when I went to visit Geoff [in San Luis Obispo] for spring break and took my Tioga City Slicker tires with me. Why, you ask? Well, we held the first SLO Parking Garage Invitational Midnight Criterium last week. The parking garage, a brand new building that has received harsh criticism for its avant-garde architecture, has five, count ‘em five, floors, with hairpin turns all the way down—perfect for testing people’s bike handling skills. If you take the turns too wide, which can happen when a competitor forces you out, you hit these six-inch-high domes of painted cement. Gnarly! It was a total blast. 

Anyhow, when I returned to Isla Vista, I forgot to bring the City Slicker tires back with me, and had to mount up the Farmer Johns. They were really old, had been sitting around a good while. Well, on Monday I was just riding along, minding my own business, on the celebrated UCSB bike path when all of a sudden . . . BLAM! The rear tire just blew clean off the rim. Everybody in the vicinity jumped about three feet in the air. Being late as usual, I had to just keep riding the dang thing. It was pretty funny. Anyhow, upon careful inspection when I got home, I noticed that about a four-inch section of the rear tire had a severely damaged bead. I should have replaced the tire altogether but don’t have the time or the money, so I’ve continued to ride that baby, just at real low pressure. 

Which returns us to my original story. So I’m giving this guy a ride on my handlebars; the bike’s squirming around everywhere due to the low tire pressure; I can hardly see around the guy; I can hardly reach the brake levers; his full backpack is smashing into my face; it’s dark; and we’re wearing sunglasses. (Okay, it wasn’t dark and we weren’t wearing sunglasses … just couldn’t resist the “Blues Brothers” reference.) But hey, none of this is any problem because I’m a bike racer, right? We crash up and down off the bike path a number of times, narrowly missing other bikers and pedestrians, wobble quite a bit during slowdowns, and I actually enjoy some success in creating the illusion that I’m in control. That is, until we come within a block of [my apartment building] La Loma and a tiny Chicano kid, a toddler really, rides right out in front of us on his tiny bike. 

Well, his reflexes obviously haven’t developed yet, and ours are severely limited, and we’re on a collision course! I don’t know which way to go around him because I can’t predict what he’s gonna do, I mean it could be anything, or nothing. So my friend and I both begin yelling, like the two convicts in “Raising Arizona” when they realize they have left a man behind: “AAAAAAAAAUGH!” After narrowly averting disaster through my expert bike handling and our ability to remain cool in a pinch (well, okay, maybe it was just luck), we look over at the parents of the kid, expecting them to be super pissed, ready to kill us for recklessly endangering their child. But instead they’re laughing. Laughing! Cripes, don’t these parents know danger when they see it? They certainly wouldn’t have been laughing if little Junior had been trampled into the asphalt by over 350 pounds of man and bike, the unmistakable tread of the Tioga Farmer John’s Cousin embedded in his face!

October 12, 1991 – Berkeley

I need to find a dentist out here. I’ve asked my pals for recommendations and usually get kind of a blank look. But a guy at the bike shop, B—, who looks and acts like Bill or Ted from “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” did give me the name of his guy. I think I’ve mentioned B— to you before, he’s the guy who separated his shoulder mountain biking and then sold all his prescription Vicodin so he could buy ganja. Anyhow, he said his dentist is “totally kickback” to the point that B— talked the guy into dispensing unnecessary laughing gas, just for the hell of it, and for free no less. (B— is quite the salesman.) That doesn’t seem entirely professional to me. And then, as if an afterthought, B— told me about the last time he had a cavity filled. He’d had all this Novocain, of course, and then afterward he decided to smoke some weed, which of course gave him the munchies, so he went and bought this big sandwich, and he was eating away on it and then something seemed wrong and he looked closely and the sandwich was all covered in blood. Turns out he’d been chewing on his tongue because he couldn’t feel it! Daaaaamn!

March 13, 1992 - Berkeley

A couple of my roommates and I have a Thursday tradition of boys’ night out. (Not like there are any girls in our lives to exclude from these outings, of course, and if there were girls in our lives, we’d surely bring them along, or more to the point they’d bring us along … but I digress.) We sometimes start at the Come Back Inn, which is a barebones place, not much furniture, mainly linoleum, and I think their name is based on how they routinely get shut down for serving alcohol to minors, and then they do their time and re-open. It’s not uncommon to stand around there with a pitcher of beer since there’s no place to set it down. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen dudes drinking right out of the pitcher. But we also like the more upscale places, Henry’s and Raleigh’s. My roommates are always hoping to hit it off with some hot coed, and they have this theory that if they pump iron right before we go, their muscles will look bigger and they’ll become irresistible to women. (They have a home weight set, including  a bench press.) That strategy just might work for them one of these times, but as you know I don’t have any musculature to speak of and if I tried to pump iron I’d just injure myself.

So anyway, we were at the pub and E— was scoping out the babes, kind of like a lion surveying the savanna deciding what prey to go after, and finally decided on this cute blonde. He caught his reflection in a mirrored beer ad, checked his hair, straightened his red Ralph Lauren Polo shirt, shot us a quick look as if to say, “Watch this,” and set out to start a conversation. He headed over and exchanged what couldn’t have been more than a few words before turning away and walking back to us, tail between his legs. Man, he was pissed. “NorCal sucks,” he said. “In L.A. and San Diego women were actually cool, they’d give you the time of day. But you get a chick up here who’s even halfway good-looking and she’s totally stuck up.” M— and I gave him a hard time for getting shut down so hard, but we held back a bit as he was clearly smarting.

Well, then he spotted some other young beauty but speculated that she’d be just as snooty, even though her blond hair was obviously dyed. Somehow we got to daring each other to go ask her what color her hair really was. We all liked the idea in principle but nobody was volunteering, so we ended up doing roshambo (i.e., rock-paper-scissors) and of course I lost. So I went over, sat next to her at the bar, said hi, took a few moments and a few sips to get my courage up, and then—looking her right in the eye—popped the question: “What color is your hair, really?” She said, “Oh, this is my natural color.” What could I say? Looking at her dark eyebrows, I said, “Well, what about your eyebrows, then?” Without missing a beat she said, “Oh, I dye those.” Wow. I was impressed. Such quick thinking, totally unrattled, and best of all not hostile! I replied, “Well, you did a great job. I never would have guessed.” 

I was kind of pleased with myself for not seizing up completely at her retort. And since she was pretty fly to begin with, it seemed well worth trying to turn this into an actual conversation. So I tried, and I’d say I lasted at least another 90 seconds before completely running out of things to say. I suppose I felt like how a rodeo rider must feel, where every second he stays on the bucking bronco grows his achievement. It didn’t even occur to me to buy her a drink, which would have bought me at least a few more minutes. But what can I say? I got no game, and eventually I wandered back over to my pals. “Well, you didn’t strike out as fast as E— anyway,” M— remarked. Gloating just a bit (I have to admit), I tried to deploy some swagger: “You know, that’s actually a pretty good pickup line. At least it was novel. I’m gonna use that again. I totally could have gotten her number, if I’d wanted.” Of course my pals just laughed in my face. That’s what friends are for, right?

July 15, 1997 – San Francisco

For my birthday E— bought me this cool a magic lamp thingy. It’s is a cube-shaped wooden frame, open at the top and bottom, with rice paper for walls. Inside is a cylinder of thin paper with figures cut out of it, with colored cellophane covering the cutouts. The cylinder’s roof is a paper pinwheel, and the center of it is a tiny glass dome that sits on a little needle, to form a bearing. Beneath this there’s a little light bulb. Heat from the bulb is turns the pinwheel, and thus the cylinder, so that the figures of colored cellophane are projected on the rice paper walls. The effect is a moving picture of the figures (dancers, animals, etc.) that seem to dance across the rice paper, seeming to grow in size as they near the edges. I guess this would typically be a nightlight for a kid’s room. We’d seen it in a shop window in the Marina when we were out for a walk and E— noticed that I liked it, so she sneaked back there and bought it. Anyhow, we had a friend over who just stared at it, perplexed, trying to understand the point. Finally her eyebrows went up like she’d had an “aha!” moment and she said, “Oh, I get it! It’s because you guys don’t have a TV!” Um… right. That’s it.

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Biased Blow-By-Blow - 2024 Paris-Roubaix

Introduction

Sometimes the infamous “Hell of the North” classic cycling race Paris-Roubaix is held on Easter, which is tricky if I’m supposed to be entertaining guests and/or my children. This year the only obstacle to my watching—and reporting—live is my own sloth, since it’s 6 a.m. on a Sunday. But I’m up, and have my coffee, strong coffee in fact, and that means (as usual) I won’t be pulling any punches in this blow-by-blow report. If a rider is a known doper I’ll give you that background (with all appropriate vitriol); ditto if somebody’s helmet is goofy and needs to be ridiculed. This is the (low) level of journalistic integrity you can expect. Also: if Riley Sheehan (Israel-Premier Tech), who finished 13th in the Tour of Flanders last week, does absolutely anything in this race, I’ll zero in on him, for two reasons: 1) I used to race with his dad, Clark; and 2) ‘Mer’ca!

2024 Paris-Roubaix

Here is the course map:

Wow. Isn’t it funny how pointless the race seems, from that perspective? I mean, it doesn’t really go anywhere, it just snakes around as if by random. That map is so complicated, the race is already hard.

As I join the action, there’s a breakaway with Nils Politt (UAE Team Emirates) and Stefan Küng (Groupama-FDJ), along with some Swedish guy. They’ve got about 20 seconds with about 70 km to go in the race.

“Danish,” Bob Roll says. “Oh, I’m sorry, did I say Swedish?” Phil Liggett says. Oh dear. Not these two again. I was hoping for the Eurosport guys, but then I’m watching on Peacock so this is what I get. If you come across any errors in this report, you can blame them on Phil. That gives me a lot of journalistic liberty, I now realize. Hmmmm.

They’re on a four-star section of cobbles. These ratings, by the way, are from Yelp users. I just read one of the reviews of this sector: “Pretty good rocks, not too slippery, and free Coke refills, but the riders were kinda rude lol.”

Whoa, a crash! Look carefully, it’s the background there. Some guy named Van Dijke.

The breakaway has been absorbed as though by an adult diaper. The peloton is very absorbent.

“They’re picking up the dust, and it’s getting through to the tires, from the looks of it,” Phil says. His voice is so agreeable, so confident and authoritative, it’s tempting to ascribe some meaning to his words … but so often I cannot.

Bob’s delivery has this chipper, upbeat flavor that is pleasant to listen to, but doesn’t really highlight the drama. I can so easily picture him narrating an elementary school crafts activity. “Well, it looks like they’re going to be doing papier-mâché, based on the newspaper strips and the balloons,” he’d say cheerfully.

Now Politt and Fred Wright (Bahrain Victorious) are off the front but they won’t get very far. The much-touted favorite today is last week’s Tour of Flanders winner Mathieu Van der Poel (Alpecin-Deceuninck), who has been so ballyhooed, I’d like to see someone else win just to make things more interesting.

OMG, Van der Poel must have heard me because he goes right to the front and drills it! How is he hearing me? Is his directeur sportif reading this report as I type it, through Van der Poel’s earpiece? That must be it.

And just like that, he has a massive gap!

Could he endure, solo, for 57 km? Yeah, probably. This year we saw Tadej Pogacar solo for 80 km in the Strade Bianche race (with a little help from his friends, and I don’t mean teammates). I’m not saying Van der Poel isn’t clean, mind you. But his dominance would be more believable if he weren’t breathing through his fricking nose. I mean, come on.

I don’t know, though. A 57 km solo breakaway? I mean, wouldn’t he get lonely? Is this some COVID aftermath thing where Van der Poel has forgotten how to socialize?

“They’re trying to chase but they’re soooooooo tired,” Phil says. I think he’s projecting. Why would they be particularly tired, this far from the finish? They’re professionals, and they’re not 80 years old.

The gap is out to 25 seconds with 53 km left. You know what? I’m tired of Van der Poel. And I don’t like his socks. They’re too tall, like the tube socks I wore in the ‘80s.

Tom Pidcock (Ineos Granadiers) is just sitting on the back of this disorganized, disheveled chase group. He’s an Olympic gold medalist in mountain biking and a cyclocross world champion, so I’d hoped he could figure in this race, but apparently not.

Is the chase group really “disheveled”? No, I confess it’s not, particularly. That was poetic license. I’m trying to keep myself awake because this race has gotten so boring.

“He’s the world champion, Van der Poel,” Phil says, as if helpfully. Yeah, Phil, I know what the rainbow stripes on his jersey mean. I think most cycling fans understand the difference between the world champion’s jersey and, say, the pride flag. (Van der Poel isn’t gay, as far as I know—I don’t pay attention to the riders’ personal lives.)

Come to think of it, I wish I were on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter that all journalists will always refer to as “X, the platform formerly known as Twitter,” because X is a stupid name) because then I could X (is that a verb, or do we still say “tweet”?) some irresponsible things like, “Amazing breakaway—will Van der Poel be the first gay winner of Paris-Roubaix?” That might get some traction because it would be perceived as the only interesting thing about this race today. (The difficulty in expressing facetiousness in such a short form is one of the main reasons I don’t do social media.)

“He’s just adjusted his cleats, and now he’s taking the corner!” Phil says. Bob replies with a chuckle, “Well, he’s not tightening the screws on his shoes, of course, but he is scorching this course.” I am not making this up. That verbal exchange did just happen. It’s so funny … these guys remind me of an old married couple, where the husband is always diplomatically saying, with a little good-natured head shake, “What my wife means to say is…”

Van der Poel’s lead is out to 1:31 and he’s still breathing through his nose. If that lead starts to drop, and gets down below like 20 seconds, all he’ll have to do is open his mouth, and that’ll be like firing the afterburners and his lead will go right back out again. Imagine how confident he must feel, knowing he’s got that Ace card up his sleeve if his legs ever start to hurt.

“Should he have a mechanical, his team car is right there,” Bob explains helpfully in case there are any idiots watching. I guess Bob is running out of things to say. And in fairness, that’s not really his fault. It’s gotten to the point that nobody even needs to say “Van der Poel” anymore, it’s just “he” because there’s really nobody else important in the narrative anymore. If you’ve read Wolf Hall, that’s the same narrative style that Hilary Mantel uses … throughout the book she never says “Thomas Cromwell,” only “he” and “him.” That’s why it’s so important to get our personal pronouns right … in case we ever become important enough to referred to only by them. Can you believe I’m rambling on about literature and pronouns? Trust me, it’s more interesting than this race.

How’s this for a headline: “Van der Poel crushes Paris-Roubaix … but does he have a crush on Pidcock?” I know that’s irresponsible. Pidcock isn’t gay, as far as I know, but without some kind of intrigue I’m going to give up on this race completely.

His lead is up to 1:46, which is actually interesting because I’m talking about Cromwell now. No I’m not. It’s Van der Poel, Van der Poel, Van der Poel. Blah blah blah.

He reaches sector #4, which would be good news if the numbers went up, but they don’t, they decrement. So he has just four sectors to get through safely, one of which (the last one) is so short and easy, even Cromwell could handle it, on a high wheeler. If you haven’t heard of a high wheeler, it’s another term for penny farthing. I’m not sure which term Cromwell would have used. I may go research that now, just for something to do. Stay tuned.

Phil just said, “Adri Van der Poel.” Bob, to his credit, doesn’t jump in and correct him. He pauses, surely squinting as if in pain and thinking, “Please Phil, please correct yourself.” Phil does, saying, “I don’t know why I keep saying Adri, that’s Mathieu’s father, I used to watch him race [back in the good old days when my mental faculties were intact].”

“He’s visibly flying over these cobblestones,” Phil now says. I guess he’s referring to the lack of any cloaking device that would render Van der Poel’s effort invisible. That would actually be a really cool innovation for this sport, if they could have cloaking devices. Riders would only get to use them for a set amount of time per race, or perhaps the cloaking device would draw down their strength and have to be used very strategically. So a good rider could turn it on, chase like crazy, and then suddenly appear on Van der Poel’s wheel. I guess it would take something like that to neutralize the Dutchman’s dominance.

“Surely [Wout] van Aert [sidelined with an injury] is watching these pictures with a little bit of frustration,” Phil says, “because I think he has a thing for Van der Poel and is very jealous of Pidcock.” Yeah, I made up that last part. It’s easy to put words into Phil’s mouth because nothing would seem out of character for him.

But what’s this? He’s overcooked a corner and goes off the road! Maybe he’ll stack and breathe new life into this race!

Nope, he saves it, and—interestingly enough—his lead actually increases by three seconds through this unexpected maneuver.

“The showers are very famous. Every rider’s name is engraved on the shower. Well, on the wall I mean. Of the shower.” Phil actually just said this. I think he meant every winner’s name. But how did he get to talking about the showers? I wasn’t paying attention (my mind having wandered to Wolf Hall and how engrossing that was compared to this race) and suddenly I hear the word “shower” which is one of the only words I’ve heard Phil use that isn’t a cliché. Perhaps he’s seeding innuendo.

Oh no! A rider totally stacks in a corner!

It’s Laurence Pithie (Groupama-FDJ) and man, that looked really painful.

While the camera was fawning over Van der Poel, the chase group behind broke up and is now down to four riders. Here it’s being led by Stefan Küng (Groupama-FDJ), who finished third in this race in 2022. But Küng doesn’t look like he’s trying that hard since he’s breathing through his nose just like Van der Poel. Or could I be mistaken about mouth-breathing being more effective? Is this Mona Lisa style some new aerodynamic thing?

Maybe Küng is just having an off day. It does look like his pre-race ritual was interrupted because he never worked that foundation into his skin. That’s not very professional, obviously. These riders are supposed to know how important it is to get their makeup right. Cycling is very much a psychological sport and a rider cannot show weakness, and of course cosmetics play a huge role. Studies have shown that the first thing a professional rider notices, on the start line, is his rival’s complexion, which is why foundation and concealer make such a big impact. Riders are often perceived differently if they have discoloration, under-eye bags, or blemishes. Fortunately Küng is blessed with almost perfect skin, which he’s used to great advantage throughout his career.

Jasper Philipsen, Van der Poel’s Alpecin-Deceuninck teammate, gets to just loaf on the back of the chase group, obviously. This means he’ll be nice and fresh for the sprint, and since he’s one of the fastest sprinters in the world to begin with, we won’t even have an exciting race for second place, unless Küng gets his face together, does something with his hair, and opens his mouth for the final sprint.

Here’s another boring photo of Cromwell. I mean Van der Poel.

Pithie seems uninjured from his gnarly crash and is now working well with Florian Vermeersch, Philipsen’s Alpecin–Deceuninck teammate, so perhaps they’ll catch the lead quartet of chasers. That would make it even easier for Philipsen to take second, making this race even more boring and predictable.

“If I just said ‘Adri’ I apologize,” Phil says. Which is kind of sad, because he hadn’t just said Adri; he’s simply doubting himself because he’s no longer aware of what he’s even saying anymore. I guess that’s partly my fault. Okay, now I feel bad.

Van der Poel is on Sector 3 now and his lead is now almost three minutes. Perhaps the only way he could lose now is if he got cocky and stopped to sign a few autographs. “But he’s far too clever a rider for that,” Phil does not say.

Not that you care, but leading the chase group is Mads Pedersen (Lidl-Trek), a former Wordle champion. It’s rare to see a top rider who also excels at word games. Oh, wait. Bob has just corrected me: Pedersen is a former world champion. That actually makes more sense.

OMG, Phil just used the phrase “suitcase of courage” for about the four hundredth time in his career. “But I don’t think anybody is going to catch Van der Poel before the showers today,” he continues. Again with the shower thing! Perhaps he’s just as bored as I am. Actually he’s probably even more bored, because I’ve only been reporting on these races for eleven years (my first blow-by-blow being the 2013 Giro d’Italia), whereas Phil has been reporting on cycling for something like fifty years.

Van der Poel is on Sector 2, which is only a two-star section. Here’s one of the Yelp reviews: “This section is kind of meh, just a bit of dust and dirt and a couple weeds not sure why such a long line overrated imho.”

It looks like the chase group is down to three now, having dropped Küng (who will surely learn his lesson and never, neglect his pre-race makeup ritual again).

Wow, with five km to go, Van der Poel is already starting to celebrate, giving his DS a fist-bump. Maybe with three kilometers to go he’ll try to give this guy a hug, which would be just the kind of dangerous move that might make the race interesting for a moment.

Is that white nail polish on his right thumb? Is that a thing now? I’ll have to pay close attention to Küng’s nail polish. What color did he choose?

“What do you do with a horse, do you tap it on its neck, when it’s about to win?” Phil asks. What? Has he lost his mind?

“He will be the first rider since Peter Sagan in 2018 to cross the Paris-Roubaix finish line wearing the rainbow jersey of the Wordle champion,” let’s pretend Phil just said. Van der Poel is now on the velodrome with a gap of three minutes over the guys we might call “chasers” if they were actually doing anything but running out the clock and waiting for the sprint.

Well, here it is. Thomas Cromwell becomes the 121st winner of Paris-Roubaix.

Politt makes a surprising early attack on the velodrome but it comes to nothing. Philipsen takes second!

Isn’t it remarkable how little my exclamation point did just now to make that sprint finish exciting? I guess you’re probably not very impressed that I predicted the outcome. I guess that doesn’t make me an oracle or anything.

They’re interviewing Van der Poel:

INTERVIEWER: You have just won Paris-Roubaix, having won Flanders only a week ago. Does this win have a different flavor?

VAN DER POEL: This one was kind of oaky and jammy, with a toasty undertone and hints of cherry. Kind of a fruit-forward win but just a bit tannic.

INTERVIEWER: Was it planned, to take off that early?

VAN DER POEL: I find it interesting that you use the passive voice, “was it planned,” because that’s rather appropriate in that it wasn’t really anything active like an attack. I just increased my effort because I wanted to make the race super hard. I know it was a tailwind to the finish line.

INTERVIEWER: Were you worried about a puncture or some other setback [since obviously nothing else could stop you]?

VAN DER POEL: Well that’s always possible but I had a support car, duh!

INTERVIEWER: It must be pretty special to win two monuments back to back…

VAN DER POEL: Yes, well, what can I say? I had a good hair day.

INTERVIEWER: Is it really as simple as that? [Tom] Boonen was practically bald, after all.

VAN DER POEL: I’m kind of at a loss for words, actually. I’m a cyclist, not a statesman.

INTERVIEWER: You mean, a statesman like Thomas Cromwell?

VAN DER POEL: Exactly.

Okay, I admit, I made most of that up. The bit about the tailwind is real, though. And the support car part, minus the duh part.

Here’s the top ten:

And now Van der Poel hoists the famous cobblestone trophy. Note that they were able to affix the plaque well in advance because they knew he’d win today.

Here’s a fun fact: I did some research and it turns out the stone used for the Paris-Roubaix trophy isn’t actually a cobblestone, which would be composed mainly of granite. It’s actually mostly pumice, which was selected for these trophies some decades ago when too many modern cyclists were unable to heft an actual cobblestone. So the rock Van der Poel is hoisting there is very similar to this one that your famously wimpy blogger was able to handle with ease (despite my Oscar-worthy grimace which is just for show).

Okay, full disclosure, I freestyled a bit with the trophy/stone thing. It is a real cobblestone as far as I know. 

Here is the final podium.

Well, that’s about it for this year’s race. I’m sorry if this report was kind of boring, but at least I saved you some time … this race took me two and a half hours to watch, and I wish I could take that time back and do something more exciting with it, like sleeping.

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If William Wordsworth Were Writing Today

Introduction

What if William Wordsworth (1770-1850) were writing today? And what if he had a corporate-type editor? Imagine the instant-messaging dialogue that might take place after the great poet submitted a new work for review. Actually, you don’t need to, because that’s what this post is about. The launch point is this timeless Wordsworth poem, from 1807.

Wordsworth’s poem

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
 
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of the bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
 
The waves beside them danced; but they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
 
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils. 

The dialogue

BANES: well i’ve read the poem and i think its a good start. a solid start

WORDSWORTH: Actually, it’s complete.

BANES: dont need to add anything

BANES: just tighten it up a bit

WORDSWORTH: I don’t see your point.

BANES: well you know poetry its so good at being sucint. thats  why its so popular right. i  mean those who still read poetry want concise

WORDSWORTH: My poem is under 200 words. That is not long.

BANES: its all relative

BANES: what is that poem about the subway and petals on a wet black bough so good can you do more like that

WORDSWORTH: If you’re asking me to plagiarize Ezra Pound, no. If you want me to adapt my style to imitate him, hell no.

BANES: no nothing like that just concise

BANES: like that first stanza maybe get that across in one line

BANES: get to the point faster

WORDSWORTH: Oh, I see. So I could get the entire poem down to the size of a tweet.

BANES: exactly

WORDSWORTH: I was being sarcastic.

BANES: no need for that i am trying to help

WORDSWORTH: Every word in every line is essential or I would have removed it already. That’s what makes me a poet.

BANES: you need to adapt

BANES: modern readers = shorter attetnion span

BANES: no time for flourishes etc

WORDSWORTH: Well then just call me a pagan suckled in a creed outworn.

BANES: what are u talking about

WORDSWORTH: I gather you’re unfamiliar with my earlier works.

BANES: really what are you talking about and never mind your earlier works

BANES: you have currency now so lets leverage that

WORDSWORTH: I assume you’re referring to Taylor Swift name-dropping me in her song, literally one line after decrying “some namedropping sleaze,” ironically enough.

BANES: taylor swift yes exactly

BANES: we need to get on that

WORDSWORTH: I won’t disgrace myself by pandering to pop culture.

BANES: i'm trying to help you here. u want to be replaced by A.I.?

WORDSWORTH: If you think ChatGPT can write poetry, you’re delusional.

BANES: look, you know why coleridges poems are so successful? He’s writing about big-screen TVs, pleasure domes, and opium trips. your writing about dancing flowers

WORDSWORTH: Have you even read my poem?

BANES: yes

BANES: in fact i found some errors

BANES: like, i'm sure you saw lots of flowers but not continuous, not 10K

BANES: and lakes dont have waves

WORDSWORTH: Actually, Windermere lake is the largest in England and does have waves. As usual you have no idea what you’re talking about.

BANES: look work with me here you have some good stuff here, lonely = emo can resonate with readers

BANES: just tigten up a bit and we’re good

BANES: and doesnt matter what lake, actually not saying which lake is better

BANES: in fact i wanted to ask you

BANES: poetry now needs to be hyper local

BANES: i'm thinking different versions of poem by region

BANES: can we do one for CA and change from daffodil to poppy (state flower

WORDSWORTH: I am not a staff writer for a tourism board. And I’m not rewriting the final rhyming couplet to support “poppies.”

BANES: about that rhyming

BANES: kind of passe

WORDSWORTH: Taylor Swift uses rhyme.

BANES: touche

BANES: but getting back to the number of flowers

BANES: never ending line & 10K, nobody is buying that

WORDSWORTH: I’m employing a standard poetic device called hyperbole. I guess they didn’t teach you that in business school.

BANES: why cant you just be more precise

WORDSWORTH: Are you my editor or my fact-checker?

BANES: readers dont want to be decieved

WORDSWORTH: Are you going to revoke my poetic license?

BANES: look maybe i dont have a fancy degree from Oxford but i know my stuff

WORDSWORTH: My degree is from Cambridge.

BANES: whatever

BANES: look there is an incosistency in the poem you start with lonely & brooding and then later your all talking about bliss of solitude

BANES: not as strong as other parts need to tighten up

WORDSWORTH: This just demonstrates how completely you have missed the point. “That inward eye which is the bliss of solitude” is exactly what this supposed audience of modern readers has lost, due to the constant intrusion of Twitter, Snapchat, and the never-ending smartphone “feed.” There is no more bliss because there is no more solitude. And nobody can just enjoy their natural surroundings without stopping to snap photos and share them on Instagram.

BANES: nobody says instnagram anymore its insta

WORDSWORTH: You know what? We’re done here. You can take our contract and shove it. I’ll just put my poem on my blog.

BANES: actually i wanted to talk to you about that

BANES: its time to monetize your blog

BANES: adsense can make us some money if we get the seo right

BANES: untapped potential there

BANES: you already did the work

BANES: dont you want to get paid

BANES: hey are you still there

BANES: ???

BANES: hey

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Teens, Texts, and the Marshmallow Test

Introduction

I’ve blogged before about the nexus of parenting, dopamine, and social media, but have come to realize the problem is worse than I originally thought.  In this post I look at how social media and the popularity of cell phone text messaging are reshaping not just our behavior but aspects of our psychology.  In particular I’ll examine how the influence of electronic socializing may be significantly undermining the prospects of the next crop of adults.

Evolution of phone use

In the beginning we just had phones, one per household.  You reached your friend if a) he was home, and b) nobody else was using the phone.  So often the phone just rang and rang, or you dictated a message to your friend’s little brother, who most likely only pretended to take it down.  There was no expectation of recourse if your phone call didn’t reach its target.

Then we got call waiting  and the answering machine, which meant that if your friend’s little brother didn’t simply ignore your waiting call, or somebody didn’t accidentally delete your voice-mail, you had a pretty good chance of getting a call back sooner or later.

And then we got the cell phone.  For the first time in history our friends could expect to reach us at any time.  The phone wasn’t a household device anymore, but a personal device, so we could now hold our friends directly accountable for not answering or returning our call.  Sure, this device brought us freedom—from having to be organized, from waiting around at home for a call—but it also brought the shackles of greater accountability.

Finally, we have reached a saturation point with modern cell phones and smartphones:  our friends can now expect a response even when we don’t have time to talk.  Text messaging is tremendously handy for the person initiating the dialog, but can create a social burden for us when we receive a text.  Why?  Because somehow our ever-connected society has evolved to expect an immediate response whenever we send a text message.  The personal cell phone has become like the red phone in the White House.

Is this even true?

Okay, that’s a pretty strong generalization I’ve just made, and you’re right to question on what basis I made it. 

First, I have my own experience:  over the years I’ve received an increasing number of text messages even though I almost never respond.  I’ve had to train friends and colleagues not to rely on this mode of communication, by telling them flat out, “I never look at texts.”  They have come to accept this idiosyncrasy, much as you’d accept a friend being lactose-intolerant.

Meanwhile, we’ve all seen people, particularly teens but adults too, pausing in the middle of a face-to-face conversation to answer their cell phone or return a text.  Sometimes while texting they’ll pretend to still be listening to you while clearly losing the thread of what you’re saying.  This phenomenon has made it into a “New Yorker” cartoon, and my kids’ babysitter even committed this rudeness, seeming to forget I was her employer.

Of course such anecdotal evidence isn’t enough, so I turn to the testimony of a thought leader in this space, the YouTube artist sWooZie, who has created a video called “Textually Active” (subtitled “The art of text messaging and how people mess it up!”).  In this video, sWooZie codifies the impatience I’ve been talking about:  “You know what’s annoying?  People who take hours to text back, especially when they hit me up in the first place…  If you get busy, just say ‘In class - brb,’ or ‘@ work - brb.’”  (Thankfully, he doesn’t include “Driving – brb,” though many teens cite “not wanting to be rude” as their rationale for texting while driving, as described here and here.)

More insight from sWooZie

Poor response time isn’t the only issue sWooZie tackles; he also airs his grievance with replies that are too brief:  “The letter ‘K’ is only acceptable when somebody is stating a fact or looking for confirmation.  For example, ‘Hey, I’m in your driveway, let’s go,’ or ‘Hey, I’m on my way...’  If you text me the letter ‘K’ for any other reason, don’t be looking all confused when I show up in my Goku outfit ‘bout to bust a Kamehameha up in your grille!” 

But sWooZie’s greatest gripe is with people who don’t respond at all to a text: 

And then there’s those times when you’re sitting at home relaxing, checking your Facebook, and you see your friend update their status, like, “Ohh my gawwww!  Powerpuff Girls marathon on Cartoon Network!”  And instead of commenting on their wall you text them, because you’ve got special friend privileges, unlike their other 90 billion Facebook friends, and like two hours go by, and you ain’t heard jack, and you start thinking:  You know what?  I don’t even like stupid Powerpuff Girls!  Why’d I text them in the first place?  I seen you update your Instagram like two minutes ago.  Oh, you’re just gonna totally ignore me, like I don’t even exist.  Now I’m in a bad mood when I go to watch “Glee.”  My night is ruined.

Significantly, the ignored message that we see sWooZie send his Facebook friend is of a trivial nature:  “Lol. saw ur fb post. Bubbles FTW!!”  The content of this message isn’t important; what matters to sWooZie is what the exchange (or rather the lack of exchange) says about his social currency.  Each text he sends is a social overture, and each lack of response becomes, for him, a litmus test of his social standing.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against sWooZie.  Actually, “Textually Active” is a funny, clever movie, so much so that I almost wonder if sWooZie is doing something sly with it—a satire, perhaps, of the insecurity bred into us by this texting, social-media-obsessed culture.  Even if it is, the viewer response seems sincere and earnest.  To date, the video has received over 7 million hits, with over 100,000 positive comments and fewer than 2,000 negative ones.  A lot of viewers commiserate with him:  “SO TRUE MAN,” “We all been there,” “I know how you feel this happens to me and it SUCKS.”

One viewer comment on sWooZie’s video presents a compelling counterpoint:  “My texting peeve is when people over-exaggerate the emotional worth of a text and get all pissy when I don’t text even though I tell everyone that I don’t like texting especially when I am playing a videogame.”  This is a tricky matter, though, isn’t it?  Who is the ultimate arbiter of the emotional worth of a text?  And how is sWooZie supposed to know when his pal is playing a video game?  (Oh, right … Twitter.)

Texts as tokens

Ultimately, messages of 140 characters or less—unless written by a master poet—aren’t all that eloquent, and the rapid-fire, ultra-casual nature of the medium isn’t normally associated with deathless prose.  I’m no Facebook expert, but I gather it’s a pretty informal medium as well, with most of the value coming from immediacy, not eloquence.  All this social commerce, then, seems to emphasize the act of texting—the gesture of the text—above the content.  In other words, each text is more like a token, like social currency, than it is a real communication between two people.

A friend of mine had a reunion recently with a bunch of high school friends.  They all went out to dinner, and several of them were texting and tweeting and Instagramming throughout the evening.  Two of them posted the same photo of their dessert to their Facebook pages, and then one got all sore because her friend’s photo got more “likes.”  Later, the friend with the higher number of likes started to freak out because her cell phone battery was dying.  She eventually talked a bartender into charging it for her.  And for what?  Wasn’t the point of the evening the old friends who were right in front of her?  All these likes and texts strike me as the social equivalent of a morphine drip:  continual social affirmation, little bursts of dopamine, that become practically addictive.  The smartphone, though cordless, is like an umbilical cord.  Even when you’re in the presence of friends, the phone is a hedge against loneliness and obscurity.

And thus, modern socializing of the electronic sort becomes a matter of quantity over quality, with an emphasis on immediacy and ease.  People used to write letters, which were a lot of work, and which didn’t get a very quick reply, but these were deeper communications, and documents you might feel like keeping.  Now we have texts and tweets that are dashed off quickly, read in seconds, and then forgotten.  They’re the social equivalent of fast food:  no waiting, little cost, but not particularly nourishing.

So what?

By now you’re tired of this, and I realize I sound like a scold, and anyway what’s wrong with being impatient socially when our social media and texting technologies do seem to give us what we want?  Isn’t a wide network with casual shout-outs better than moldering away by ourselves somewhere, reading a fusty old novel, or knitting, or (gasp!) blogging?

The answer is, this widespread social impatience starts to look like a real problem when considered from a certain perspective.  I’m thinking of a psychological test performed over several years at a nursery preschool on the campus of Stanford University in the late 1960s, and described in detail in a “New Yorker” article from 2009.  As you shall see, this study considered a link between behavior and character that psychologists might do well to revisit with electronic socializing in mind.

Here’s how the test went:  a researcher would sit a child down in a chair and offer him a marshmallow, and a proposal:  if the child could sit in front of that marshmallow without eating it while the researcher left for a few minutes, the child could have two marshmallows upon the researcher’s return.  The goal of the experiment, initially, was to observe (via hidden camera) the mental processes that enabled some children to delay gratification, while others gave in and scarfed down the single marshmallow right away.

The real discovery of the experiment came when the man running the experiment, Walter Mischel, revisited his test results many years later, and compared them to more recent information about the subjects.  He “sent out a questionnaire to all the reachable parents, teachers, and academic advisers of the six hundred and fifty-three subjects who had participated in the marshmallow task, who were by then in high school.  He asked about every trait he could think of, from their capacity to plan and think ahead to their ability to ‘cope well with problems’ and get along with their peers.  He also requested their S.A.T. scores.”  

On the basis of the responses he discovered that those who as children failed to hold out for the second marshmallow—“low delayers,” he called them—were “more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home.  They got lower S.A.T. scores.  They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships.  The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.”

Comparisons

According to a CTIA Wireless Association website, today’s average teen sends 60 text messages a day; the average teen girl sends 100 text messages a day.  Research reported here states that the average smartphone user checks his phone every six minutes, or about 150 times a day.  This compulsion, needless to say, is a learned behavior; after all, a generation ago there was no texting, and smartphones didn’t exist.  Modern technology is shaping our behavior.

Similarly, the behavior of the marshmallow test subjects was shaped by their circumstances.  For example, “when Mischel gave delay-of-gratification tasks to children from low-income families in the Bronx, he noticed that their ability to delay was below average, at least compared with that of children in Palo Alto.  ‘When you grow up poor, you might not practice delay as much,’ he says.  ‘And if you don’t practice then you’ll never figure out how to distract yourself.  You won’t develop the best delay strategies, and those strategies won’t become second nature.’”  Sure enough, he and his researchers were able to teach these strategies to children and greatly increase their marshmallow delay time.  In other words, children can be taught patience.

Synthesis

Of course teaching children patience isn’t a new concept, but why should we even bother if we then give them smartphones and social media access that seem to be systematically teaching them impatience?  How can we expect teenagers to sit down and focus on their homework, their piano practice, or even their daydreams if they’re stopping every five minutes to check their smartphone or send a text?

For a lot of parents, it’s probably too late to intervene.  Trying to take away a teenager’s smartphone and Facebook would work about as well as Prohibition did in the 1920s.  But parents with younger children and preteens can take important steps now to prevent them from one day becoming slaves to their smartphones.

A few recommendations

For one thing, we can set the right example.  All the lecturing in the world won’t help if you’re tuning out your kid every five minutes to fire off a text of your own.  (And no, engaging in such behaviors doesn’t make you seem young and hip.  Your kids still think you’re a dork, and they’re right.)  I don’t text, and I don’t automatically put face-to-face interactions on hold just because my phone tells me to.

If I’m trying to write, I will tell my kids to leave me alone so I can concentrate.  (In a bit of wonderful irony, the writer Maxine Hong Kingston—from whom I once took a writing class—has admitted to once giving her young child a whole bag of marshmallows just to keep him out of her hair so she could write.)  Do my daughters follow my example?  Well, they aren’t begging for cell phones, and they love to write too.

Another thing we parents can do is to work extra hard on teaching our kids patience now, to try to ingrain it in them.  I’ve done this all my kids’ lives simply because a) kids are whiners, b) whining can be terribly effective, and c) I’ve always sought to keep the balance of power in my favor.  Years before reading about the marshmallow test, I accidentally developed a version of it myself.  At potlucks and barbecues, my wife and I set limits on how many desserts the kids can have:  they’re allowed one small and one full-sized treat.  (I know, this is probably too much.  I’m weak.)  Well, early on one of my kids had already selected her two treats when something even better came along, brought by a potluck latecomer.  On this basis she asked if she could please, please, please have a third treat.  DENIED!  I let her cry for awhile before taking the lesser dessert off her hands so she could get the good stuff.  (As an adult, and a scrawny one at that, I have no dessert limit.)

At the same time, I set an important new rule:  going forward, the kids had better wait awhile before making their selections, because when something better comes along there’ll never again be a Dad-fostered substitution.  This rule puts a special strain on my daughters’ delay capability, because there’s no guarantee of a better dessert later, nor that the current front-runner will still be available.  But my kids tolerate this policy, because they have no other choice.  And it’s remarkable how long they’ll wait around for a better dessert to show up.

My third recommendation for avoiding the crevasse of electronic socializing is both the easiest and the hardest:  don’t let your teens have cell phones or social media accounts.  The hard part here will be convincing yourself and your spouse that this is a reasonable policy.  My earlier post on this topic makes a case for this, so I won’t repeat myself, but I’ll add that the Ph.D. child psychologist whose lecture inspired that post doesn’t let her kids have cell phones or Facebook either, and I’m sure more authorities will come out against such enslavement as time goes on.

I don’t kid myself that this policy will go down easy with my daughters.  Sure, I’ll discuss it with them, but they won’t have an easy time persuading me.  The most predictable argument—“All my friends have them!”—will get them nowhere.  After all, the CTIA says that only 77% of teens 12-17 have cell phones.  That leaves 23% who don’t, which is a very spacious minority for my kids to occupy.  After all, our household doesn’t even have cable TV.

Just the other day my older daughter asked when she’ll get a cell phone.  (“I’m just curious,” she added diplomatically.)  I replied, “How about never?”  (Obviously “never” isn’t a straight answer; of course she’ll have a cell phone as an adult.  Maybe even sooner, if society evolves beyond its current phone-induced OCD.)   I challenged my daughter to make a case for a cell phone.

“Well, it could lead to greater freedom,” she said.  “I could go to more places by myself, and you and Mom wouldn’t have to worry.”  I told her that our merely knowing where she is won’t keep her out of trouble, and added, “Besides, if your parents can reach you whenever they want, that’s not really freedom at all.  Freedom is having enough trust that we don’t need to know where you are.”  The conversation continued for a good while, and I was pleased to see my daughter making good points and not just gagging on my Kool-Aid.  And the best part?  We had each other’s complete attention.  Nobody was dinking around with a phone.

How to Succeed at Blogging

In this post I provide five rules for successful blogging.  This is not a post about how to be a wildly popular blogger, or a successful writer.  I don’t know how to do those things.

Rule #1 – Define success carefully

Consider the following Motivational Poster.

When’s the last time you encountered an unsuccessful housecat?  And if you decide a housecat is unsuccessful, you think that cat cares?  Have you ever encountered a depressed housecat?  Of course not.  (“Wait,” you may protest.  “My cat sleeps all the time—isn’t that a sign of depression?”  No, your cat is not sleeping because she’s depressed.  She’s sleeping because she’s a cat.)

My definition of a successful blog is one that shows up for work:  that is, a blog that’s updated regularly.  This might sound easy, but it’s obviously not.  My Blogger dashboard is like the damn obituaries.  To paraphrase Woody Allen, a blog is like a shark:  it has to move forward constantly or it’ll die … and what we got here is a lot of dead sharks.  Here’s a list of how long it’s been, for five of the blogs I follow, since the last post:  1 year ago, 9 months ago, 1 year ago, 10 months ago, 1 year ago.  Unfulfilled good intentions might not be the saddest thing on Earth, but it’s on the list.

Using this definition of success, my best advice is to set a goal for number of posts in a month, and commit to it.  No matter how much you have to reach for that next post, get it done and your blog won’t wither on the vine.  Of course, this is no easy feat, which is where the other rules come in.

Rule #2 – Know what you want

I’m guessing that most moribund blogs are the result of their creators getting discouraged.  I can’t blame them.  It can feel like you’re blogging into a void.  People don’t comment very often; about half of my 179 posts haven’t received a single comment.  But lack of comments doesn’t mean nobody is reading your stuff.  Lots of people are shy, and lots more struggle with typing in the unreadable codes that Blogger challenges them to type in (which is to keep robot spammers from taking over).  I get half of one percent as many comments as pageviews, and not all the comments are positive.  (One commenter wrote, below my Cowboy Sam post, “You have ruined all my wonderful childhood memories. Thanks.”  This may have been tongue-in-cheek, but the next comment, voicing agreement, certainly wasn’t.)

My point is this:  you shouldn’t look for any encouragement from your readers, if you even have any.  Who do you think you are, a writer?  Of course not.  If you were a writer, you wouldn’t be a blogger.

Okay, now I’ve hurt some feelings.  I didn’t mean to.  Let’s take a moment to define what a writer is, vs. a blogger, and situate you properly.  That might really help when it comes to fighting off discouragement.

A writer, for the purposes of this discussion, is somebody who writes for a living.  For him, writing is not just a hobby; it literally pays the bills (unless he has some crappy minimal job that lets him write all night and/or gives him material).  By definition, a writer is willing to make sacrifices.  He will tolerate poverty; will forego time with his family (or having one at all); will face the fear of total failure of his dream and his livelihood; and will humbly make changes to his stories or articles to please his editor or his market.  (Yes, I’m aware many writers are women.  I tried to do “he or she” and “his or her” but that became even more cumbersome than this parenthetical aside.)

A blogger, in this context, is somebody who wants to write but isn’t trying to make a career of it, and is unwilling to make the sacrifices a writer will make.  (I guess there are paid bloggers too but as I see it, they’re basically writers.)

Consider this schematic:

I believe that covers everybody:  all of humanity falls into category A, B, C, or D above.  Here are the categories:

A – Great writer and/or miserable failure

B – Hack or failed hack

C – Person who doesn’t write and is completely fine with that

D – Blogger

You might be surprised by my assertion that category B exists.  Isn’t somebody who wants to be a writer also somebody who wants to write?  By definition?

Well, not my definition.  I hold the sacred act of writing to a higher standard.  To me, wanting to write means writing well, which means reading constantly and widely, studying how great writers write, reading like a writer, loving language, working really hard to get the words just right, and always striving to satisfy that burning desire to produce the most honest rendition of your idea you can. 

It’s not hard to find examples of fairly successful writers who have no use for reading widely, writing well, and/or pursuing truth.  Within these pages I’ve criticized three such writers:  here, here, and here.  I disagree not just with what these three have written, but with how they approach their work.  They’re being sensational and shocking, without seeking the greater truth that, they may well realize, might tamp down their articles and make them seem less bold.

The above poster doesn’t reflect deep searching and the greatest heights of the craft of writing.  In fact, it’s pretty sensational.  But it was penned by my daughter when she was only five.  Let’s cut her some slack.

Moving on to category D:  yes, it is true that although I want to write, I don’t want to be a writer.  Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to be a writer, if somebody came to me and said, “I’d like to pay you big money to write whatever you want, and I’ll make sure it gets widely promoted, and if things go well you’ll soon have your own staff of gofers and cooks and geishas.”  But when push comes to shove, I’m just not willing to make the sacrifices real writers make.  So I blog.

Because blogging doesn’t pay anything, we bloggers are the literary equivalent of street mimes or graffiti artists.  Except that we don’t disturb the peace.  Imagine if a big city set aside certain small quiet neighborhoods for these mimes and graffitists to discreetly do their thing.  Well, that’s the blogosphere.  It’s a place to do our work, taking advantage of the infinite Internet.  Sure, we don’t have a huge subscriber base, but the flip side of this obscurity is that we don’t have to force-fit our big square posts into the tiny round holes that an editor and a market would give us.

(I guess there’s a related category: people who don’t want to write, and yet want to reach an audience.  They do Facebook and/or send off-the-cuff tweets like “Check out this TwitPic of me sitting here tweeting!” and “Just got off the toilet … am reminded of @FatBastard when he says, ‘Wait!  I didn’t eat any corn!’”)

Perhaps if you see your blogging in this context, and have modest goals like getting more practice writing, and having a free offsite server on which to store backups of your work, you’ll more easily accept the fact you’re not famous yet, and won’t be as liable to ask, “What the hell’s the point, anyway?”  Go easy on yourself, and hang in there!

(That poster has confused some people.  It’s a photo I shot by accident while crashing my bike.  The point of the picture is that, despite the fact that my bike is pointing at the sky, I’m still holding on to the bars with the non-camera hand as if I could save it.  No, I didn’t manage to, but it wasn’t a bad crash.  I was climbing a 14-percent grade, at walking speed, when it happened.)

Rule #3:  Know your audience

One of the great things about being a blogger is not having to answer to anybody (see above), and not having to “deliver an audience” (i.e., write something that will please a target group selected by advertisers).  The downside of this is that is that you get no guidance, and have no idea who is reading your blog, and what he or she thinks of it.

That’s where friends come in.  Advice from friends has given me my blogging manta:  screw the reader.  For once I think it makes sense to only listen to what you want to hear.  (Remember, we’re trying not to get discouraged.)  In my case, input of the non-praise variety usually takes the form of an apology:  “I tried to read your post but it was too long.”  To the last guy who said that, I replied, “You might try Ritalin for that.”  There’s this idea that the Internet reader has a shorter attention span than traditional readers.  Well, that may be, but I’m not going to cater to such intellectual frailty.

I once got even more pointed advice, when a writers’ group, comprising journalists and recovering journalists, let me attend one of their meetings.  At least one or two of them didn’t manage to have anything written for the meeting.  Most of them didn’t read my submission to the end; it was about four pages, single-spaced.  One of the writers ostentatiously waved my printout in my face and said, “Don’t give us this”—here he ripped the last two pages off and dropped them to the floor—“give us this!”  I didn’t know what to say.  I was stunned, thinking, “Who are you?  What are you?”

I was reminded of when I submitted the first installment of my senior thesis to my college advisor.  We met in his office to discuss it.  He waved the pages in my face and said, “Look, you’ve got a good close reading of the text.  Don’t ruin it with this.”  Did I blow him off, too?  Of course not—my grade was on the line.  If he’d told me to write about Maxine Hong Kingston (with whom he was having a feud) instead of Vladimir Nabokov, I’d have done it.  If he told me to change my topic to “Why Ms. Kingston is the self-appointed pope of PC and her paycheck is rightfully mine,” I’d have obeyed, even if the resulting paper went completely against my own beliefs.  But that was college.  As a blogger, I don’t have to take that kind of “advice.”

That said, I can’t blame those professional writers for finding my work self-indulgent and verbose.  Expanding on my previous analogy, I was like a street mime crashing an aerobics class.  Journalistic training teaches you to get to the point in the first few sentences, and keep everything nice and short.  That’s fine if the main purpose of your piece is to inform rather than enlighten.  (I might not have this exactly right; I suspect the main purpose is actually to create a body of print that can be stuffed with ads.)

I think you should consider your blog’s audience to be the kind of person who reads what you want to write.  If you love really short stuff, write it.  If you love fiction, write that.  If you like a lot of pictures, include them.  Look, you can’t bend over backwards for a reader you’ll never meet, so you might as well please yourself. 

I’ve written things I didn’t expect a living soul to read, such as How to Write a Sonnet.  That post had a completely over-the-top 500-word introduction which I thought about shortening, before deciding that the long intro wouldn’t put off the kind of nerd who might actually have the patience to learn how to write in iambic pentameter.  I didn’t let it bother me that this hypothetical audience might consist of somewhere between zero and five people.  And as it turned out, it’s become my second most popular post ever, and (despite being over two years old) got more hits last week than any other post.

One caveat to this “audience of you” principle:  don’t pull a reverse-Woody.  I’m coining a term here based on the Woody Allen quip, “The good thing about being bisexual is that it doubles your chance of a date on a Saturday night.”  A reverse-Woody is when you alienate half your potential audience by being overtly political, or sexist, or otherwise bigoted.

Rule #4 – Develop a system for your writing

Getting back to the main characteristic of a successful blog—consistency—let’s spend a moment on how to ensure you’ll make the time to write.  To some degree this is just a matter of priorities—after all, people seem to find plenty of time for TV.  But I think part of the struggle is that unlike simpler forms of expression like Facebook, texting, and tweeting, real writing requires large chunks of time, without distractions.

I can’t recommend a specific system because everybody’s life is different.  But I’ll describe my technique as an example.  I try to brainstorm ideas all the time, whenever I have unoccupied moments, by pondering things.  (Obviously it helps if you’re not always pitching yourself face-first into TV, smartphone games, “Us” magazine, crosswords, or Sudokus.)  Once I have an idea, I do a lot of pre-writing work by popping a No-Doz and going for a good hard bike ride with lots of steep climbs I can zone out on.  Between the adrenaline, endorphins, increased circulation, and caffeine, I get a whole lot of ideas for the essay.  No idea, under these expansive circumstances, seems weak or stupid or lame; the overactive critic in my writer brain can’t get a word in edgewise.  Meanwhile, I have zero distractions (other than the descents, when I repurpose my brain for the matter at hand).

But I don’t start writing once I get home.  It’s not a great idea to write while jacked up on caffeine (or adrenaline).  (I refer you to the study of spiders on caffeine:  their spinning output was great but their webs sucked.)  Of the ideas that seemed great during the ride, at least half look pretty stupid to the calm, sober mind and have to be jettisoned.  But the other ideas, which often include a basic outline and even some fully formed sentences, can be put to use.

Exactly when to carve out time to actually write the post is a more complicated matter.  Staying up late, skipping a weekend bike ride, or skipping an episode of “Modern Family” (actually, skipping the whole series, and all other shows) also helps.  A final strategy:  I don’t ask anybody to critique the essay before I post it.  That would surely improve it, but just takes too much time.  Similarly, I don’t slave to perfect my posts; at some point I have to decide they’re good enough.  It’s just a blog, after all.

Rule #5 – Let’s be careful out there

No matter how well-maintained a blog is, it’s not a success if it violates anybody’s privacy (including the blogger’s own), embarrasses an innocent party, or in any way causes the blogger to regret what he’s posted.  (Needless to say, it’s impossible to completely remove a post; anything put on the Internet is like a tattoo.)

Here are some good questions to ask yourself before posting:  is there anybody on the planet I wouldn’t want to see this?  Could my career be affected by my boss reading this?  Could my mom be offended by it?  Have I committed any reverse-Woodies?  If I ever ran for public office, would anything on my blog lend itself to compelling attack ads by political opponents?

This doesn’t mean your post needs to be defanged—you should just be aware of what you’re getting into.  Consider my post on Doping Journalists, and “Un-Boosting,” in which I suggest that the writer Andrew Tillin is an out-of-touch, self-absorbed jerk.  When I sent a link to that post to a friend of mine, who is well-connected in journalistic circles, he replied, “I sent that to Tillin!!”  Whether he was joking or not (I suspect he wasn’t), I didn’t gasp in horror.  I’d already considered the prospect of Tillin googling himself and finding my article, and if I hadn’t accepted the idea of going toe-to-toe with him I’d have toned down the piece before posting it.

Don’t want to blog?

Fine, don’t.  There are plenty of us out here already, and besides, all the best writing is found in books anyway.