Masturbation - One Blog Post At A Time

          Of all the activities that constitute thumb twiddling none compares to the King Kong of all time killers, the solitary vice, the heinous sin of self-pollution, masturbation. It is the idler’s joie de vivre, raison d’etre and fail-safe. It is the definitive dilly-dally and the perfect nightcap to a recherché lollygagger’s dalliance with himself. It is the errand that always gets done.

All was well and good in this field as the fantasies of many a pimply faced practitioner got serious work outs until a day arrived that would render this totem to complete selfishness moot at best and that was the day when the first blog was posted.

Far be it from me to judge someone who feels he has something to say. The world needs people to shout it from the rooftops, but sheesh, some of you cats go at it like a Jehovah’s Witness on a deadline. Everyday, all day, 25/8, long strokin’ it like Miss Kitty.... furiously pounding the keys with a nary a cogent thought on the horizon. Stephen King’s most horrific creation. The UNDAUNTED! “THEY HAVE NOTHING TO SAY!...AND THEY WILL NEVER…EVER...STOP SAYING IT!”

This is the grand problem with the Internet. It gives the illusion of equanimity with none of the bitter aftertaste because there are no real consequences. You have a bully pulpit to rail and slam. In this age of uncertainty, the Internet provides false bravado to anyone who is in desperate need of a close-up. We all want corroboration from some respectable constituency that our contribution matters, but sadly this is not the fact. 

Armed with a laptop and high-speed connection bloggers lie in wait like the house dick ready to pounce on an unsuspecting ingénue who has been bringing gentlemen up to her room for roundelays of footsie and illegal hootch. What’s the point? Even in the rarified world of serious blogging it is Sisyphean at best. It is a great conceit though. The public feels it’s somehow becoming a legitimate force in an increasing unwieldy world, but deep down you know it is masturbation pure and simple.

None of this can go back in the box. The great egalitarian notion that is the essence of the Internet is here to stay and any half-baked succubus or discarded lover with an axe to grind and a soapbox can ululate until the cows come home which they never do. This entire regurgitated backwash that disguises itself as serious discourse hs transmogrified into a fetid, dark wave where millions and millions of dilettantes surf the day away.

            Sylvester Graham (1794-1851) was America’s very first advocate for healthy living. Graham was a Presbyterian minister whose philosophy of a healthy lifestyle was predicated on two unobservable principles: anything pleasurable was a canard issued from the trick bag of Satan and any immoral behavior had to be inherently unhealthful as well. He invented the Graham cracker originally as part of the Graham diet, a regimen to suppress carnal urges.

            This quote from Sylvester Graham describing the end result of the chronic onanist also fits nicely into describing the denizens of the blogosphere who, most of them I am sure, double dip at the drop of a hat. “This general mental decay,” Graham warned, “continues with the continued abuses, till the wretched transgressor sinks into a miserable fatuity, and finally becomes a confirmed and degraded idiot, whose deeply sunken and vacant glassy eye, and livid, shriveled countenance, and ulcerous, toothless gums, and fetid breath, and feeble broken voice, and emaciated and dwarfish and crooked body, and almost hairless head—covered, perhaps, with suppurating blisters and running sores—denote a premature old age—a blighted body—and a ruined soul!”