Yes, I'm dull and boring.

Really, reeally, REEEALLY dull and BORING!! Excitement makes me nervous and edgy. In conversations, people sometimes interrupt me as if I weren't talking at all; they don't seem to hear me. In the musical "Chicago," one of the characters sings the poignant song "Mr Cellophane" because people look right through him as if he isn't there; I'm Mr Cellophane. I often talk to myself because I'm the only person who seems to pay much attention to what I'm saying. That may be why the idea of blogging appeals to me. Blogging is tantamount to talking to yourself, since you have no idea, in absence of any feedback, whether anybody is reading you. I talk to myself a lot anyway because I live alone. I talk to my dog, too, and although he sometimes answers me in dog-language, it doesn't make for scintillatingly intellectual dialogue. Blogging is quintessentially narcissistic because not only is it basically talking TO yourself, it is also to a great extent talking ABOUT yourself--another reason it appeals to me, since I'm notoriously narcissistic.

It is also quintessentially narcissistic to think anyone should give a flying bleep what I think about anything, but as I AM narcissistic, this is not the first time I've made such an assumption. Back in the period 1986-'89--back before the Internet, when we communicated by impressing cuneiform characters on clay tablets--a sort of predecessor of blogging was something called rant-zines. During this period I edited and published about 10 issues of a rant-zine called "The Occasional Journal of Nothing in Particular" (short title, OJNIP), and like most rant-zines, it consisted of narcissistic ravings about the fascinating ideas of my marvelous mind. Before the Internet, of course, publication meant snail-mail, and although postage then was nowhere near 39¢ a piece, it was enough to add up when you had a mailing list of about 20 or 30. OJNIP did have, if I may be so modest, some rather interesting articles, my favorite being a scholarly discussion of shit called "The Summa Scatologica." Slightly below that were things like a take-off on Henry Adams' "The Dynamo and the Virgin" called "The Dynamo, the Virgin, and the Dobbshead." OJNIP was a spin-off of my brief infatuation with the Church of the SubGenius, the mythical leader of which was "Bob" Dobbs. (I blush to admit now that I was naïve enough to be infatuated with something so stupid for as long as I was.) In fact, most of the mailing list, outside my own small circle of weird, psychotic friends, was taken from a SubGenius publication called "High weirdness by mail," which consisted of a directory of, among other things, other weird rant-zines. Oddly enough, OJNIP died of its success. To my great surprise, a number of the recipients gave me enthusiastic and voluminous feedback, as well as copies of their own rant-zines, and as the mailing list and feedback grew as a result of coverage in "High weirdness," I actually became a little nervous about being so successful, as well as more burdened by the mushrooming postage costs, and I ceased publication in 1989. But it was fun while it lasted, and has now emboldened me to try my hand at new and far more boring narcissistic blather via the Bloggosphere. So here I am. Bow down before my vast and fascinating intellect and tell me I'm wonderful, ye plebeian masses!

Over and out.