"What's the most important thing you've learned lately?"
Before we get to that, an explanation for those of you who may just be joining us. Plinky, as we mentioned in our post of May 18, is a "topic generator" for the uninspired blogger. Feeling a touch of writer's block? Well, check out the daily "Plinky prompt," and you'll never be at a loss for words. The problem is that the prompts themselves are rather uninspiring: the kind of thing a writing teacher might assign on the first day of class. "Don't worry. This won't be graded. I just want to get a sense of where you're at. . . ." Yawn.
So we've resisted the lure of Plinky, but, today, we just can't come up with anything.
See, the problem is, The Solipsist really isn't about anything. Most blogs have a focus. If you blog about, say, golf, then every day you just share some bit of golf arcana or your predictions for the U.S. Open. If you blog about politics, well, there's always something horrendous to write about there.
More importantly, if your blog is about "something," then other enthusiasts of said something will seek you out. They'll give you their own pointers for "striking the perfect mudwucket" (which we believe is a technical golf term). Or they'll slip you the latest dirt on Judge Sonia Sotomayor's college days as a field entomologist with Greenpeace.
The Solipsist, in contrast, is proudly about nothing. Sure, we'll ramble on and on about politics or baseball or reality television or the greeting rituals of the modern teenager. But we're not obliged to write about anything in particular. We're the "Seinfeld" of blogs.
Of course, "nothing" was good enough to keep Jerry Seinfeld in cereal and comic books for nine seasons or so.
All right, so, we're about nothing. Fine. Nothing (heh) wrong with addressing a Plinky prompt once in a while then, right?
"What's the most important thing you've learned lately?"
Look, it's not like we haven't had ideas! Just today, during a conversation, we had an idea for a story about a college offering a major in "Messianism." Seemed like it had some potential. Y'know, courses could include "Introductory Resurrection" and "The Politics of the Rapture." But then we got stuck. The problem is that, while it may or may not have potential, it probably doesn't work as a blog post. More of a short story idea. Or perhaps a skit. Basically, it's the kind of thing a writer jots down in his notebook. This writer has terrible handwriting, though, so it gets thrown on the blog instead.
"What's the most important thing you've learned lately?" Probably that if one keeps putting words down, ultimately one can generate enough text to produce a satisfactory blog entry and thus avoid Plinky for at least one more day!
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