All I Really Need to Know About Blogging I Learned From Stuart Smalley

The summer is winding down, and Genius is in full annoyance mode. He lay abed until midday, then slithered from his room with mayhem in mind. He's a tricky one. At first, he tried to wheedle me into make him french toast, even though we have frozen french toast sticks that merely require deposition into a toaster two feet from the freezer. Next on the agenda, a political debate for which he was sadly unarmed, not even grasping the bare bones basics of Bill Clinton's infamous non-inhalation. After burying his head under a couch pillow, Genius re-emerged to swat my hand away from my own laptop, and forced me to read a site of his choosing.

Hyperbole and a Half -Texas

Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's a perfectly good website, with this perfectly good post about a calamity involving Texas and a championship race. A laugh and a half. My cup of tea, if I was a tea drinker. Which I'm not. But I got some snickers out of it. My objection was to the pictures, which took an inordinate amount of time to load on my fibromyalgic-hamster-operated internet connection. So I had to question his choice. 

This takes too long to load. Why so many pictures? It's fine without them. And you'd think they would be better pictures.

Mom! That's what Allie does. She draws all the pictures in Paint. 

How come her people look like fish?

I don't know. That's just how she draws them. It's in Paint, Mom. 

Well, how come that dog looks like a real dog. but her people look like fish?

They just do. Somebody asked what's that on her head, and she said you could think of it like a shark fin. 

I'M funny. And I don't have pictures. Hers would be fine with a line of empty space between paragraphs. Like mine. I'm being published, you know.

So is she, but in her OWN BOOK. 

Maybe SHE doesn't have a husband and two kids who expect her to make sandwiches three times a day, so she has TIME to get her book published.

She has an annoying boyfriend. 

Don't you think I'm funny?

You're funny. The ones about me. 

I'm good enough. I'm smart enough. And doggone it, people laugh at me!

Allie has millions of readers.

I have readers! But I lost all my followers when I switched to a new template. Is there any way to get them back?

Nope. 

Have you even seen it? Look.

That's ugly. 

No it isn't!

Let's read about me. 

Here, you'll have to go to the old one.

Hey! How'd you get that many pageviews? That's twenty thousand. Okay. It's really only nineteen thousand thee hundred thirty-three. 

That's for a whole year. How many did you think I had?

I don't know. A couple hundred, maybe. But let's see. If you only had one, that would be almost four hundred in a year. So that really isn't very many. 

Thanks. It's not millions. But I don't know how to draw bad pictures in Paint. Besides, I loaded that page and read that whole Texas story, and then there wasn't an ending.

There was an ending. 

I only have nineteen thousand three hundred thirty-three pageviews, but I know that story needs a better ending.

Ahhh! I can't take this anymore! 

Sure. Cover your head with a couch pillow. That reminds me of this really good movie I saw a couple days ago. Okay, not a good movie, but I read the book, and it was good. It's called Native Son. By Richard Wright. I had a class and it was one of our assigned books. It's better than the movie with fat Oprah. Not thin Oprah. Here's what happens...

I told Genius the basic plot of the story, part of which involves a pillow over a head. He even removed his couch pillow. And looked at me. Intensely. Hanging onto every word. Because I CAN tell a story. Even if it's not my own. Even if it's acted by fat Oprah. I glossed over some of the final parts, just for brevity's sake. Because we all know that in the dictionary, beside the word brevity, is a picture of me. Then I jumped to the end. Genius frowned.

That's IT? 

Yeah. What do you mean? You were hanging onto every word.

I was just trying to be polite. 

Uh huh. Because you're always polite to me.

That's a terrible ending! 

Exactly. That's my payback for spending so much time reading that Texas story. Without a real end.