The Boblet is Born!

Bob goes Blogger:  The Birth of the Boblet, or Essu

By Robin Ford Wallace

            Today in the newspaper I read about Ginger Lee, the stripper who got that politico Weiner in so much trouble.  The crux of the article seemed to be that she was attributed as saying things on her blog about Mr. W. that she in fact hadn’t, but I got confused partway through because I didn’t understand the term “reblog” or, really, even the concept – if it wasn’t something she wrote, what was it doing on her blog?

            The truth is, I know squat about blogging.  It’s too new for me!  I’m a dinosaur that cooks!  In fact, as I typed them just now, the spellchecker highlighted “blog” and “blogging.”  I’m still using a version of Word that doesn’t recognize them as words.

            Yet I am a “blogger.”

            Damn.  Spellchecker didn’t like that one, either.

            My point is this has never been much of a blog.  I started it because I needed someplace to put Bob’s Little Acre that people might actually read it.  I’d been fighting with the newspaper I wrote for to put Bob on their website, and for a while I won:  A desultory collection of my columns may still be viewed in the Sentinel archives.

            But it was never that satisfying.  At the rag, nobody really cared about the Bobs but me, so they would always go up with misspellings in the titles or something else a little wrong that would spoil my pleasure in them.  If I insisted I felt like a prima donna, and in the end I just gave up.  (Since then I gave up all my fights with the newspaper and am much happier as a result – but that’s another story.)

            In any case, the technology, or my tolerance to it, had improved enough by last fall that I was able to post the Bobs online all by my pink self, and that has given me a great deal of pleasure.  Mark Twain said he could live off a compliment for two weeks, but your modern writer lives off “hits.” 

            Though they were pretty dismal at first.  I still remember my joy when I saw I’d gotten up to 15 – and my disgust when I figured out they were all me!  There was an option you had to select so the program wouldn’t count it as a hit when you went in to correct your grammar. 

Bob’s Little Acre has never “gone viral,” but these days I do notice when I’ve written a new one my hits soar for a few days.  That makes me so happy I practically pee myself.

            But the thing is, I can’t write a Bob’s Little Acre every day, or really even every week.  There’s this business of making a living, for one thing, and for another, writing Bob’s Little Acre is hard!

Yeah, yeah, you say, Bob’s Little Acre is frivolous and breezy and mostly about beer, how hard can that be?  Well, go back and read one (she said with icy dignity) and you’ll note they’re tightly organized, that they try pathetically hard to make some pithy point about Reality,  and that in some cases they actually strive to make the world a better place.  Hell, you try it.

When I first got the idea of doing Bob, that idea was to write a gardening column that was funny.  I don’t know what happened!  Sometimes when I get worried about money, or ambitious or something, I try to go back and become a real gardening writer, impart a little useful horticultural information here and there, you know the type of thing, talk about soil acidity, to see if I can’t get other newspapers to take me seriously.

  Fat chance!  Either I see an opportunity to cop a cheap laugh, and go for it every time, or I start imagining the disappointment of the regular reader, searching in vain for some sly double-entendre as I drone on and on about alfalfa or something, or I get clear aim at Big Food, or my brother Frank, and can’t resist taking my shot.

So Bob is what it is, I can’t change its spots.  And I can’t write more Bobs – but here’s my point, I want to write more SOMETHING.  I’ve got topics and topics on lists and lists all over my computer and throughout my notebooks.  The reason you go into writing is you’ve got so much to say, and are flat-chested, so that nobody pays you any mind in person.

            That, and the fact that I’ve given July over for self-improvement, gave me the idea of writing, and posting on this site, much shorter or at least much more general pieces, on a variety of themes, simply because I want to write them and I hope somebody will read them, whether or not they’re suitable for publication in the newspaper or anywhere else.  The caveat is that they shouldn’t rob me of much time in which I’m supposed to be working.  Thus I conceived what I originally called the “essu,” a cross between an essay and a haiku.

A haiku is a poem of a set number of syllables along a central theme.  Haikus compare favorably with other modern poetry in that they are, anyway, short.  Here I cannot help quoting to you my favorite one, a spoof written by Richard Brautigan:

A piece of green pepper

fell off the wooden salad bowl:

so what?
            But since I’ve already learned – I’m now on page 4 of the double-spaced version of this entry – that writing quickly doesn’t always mean writing tersely, perhaps we’d better abandon the “essu” idea and just call these pieces “Boblets.” 

Boblets will not be as studied and organized as Bobs, and they will not work so hard to get a laugh, but there will in any case be more of them – so that maybe this will start looking more like a blog, and I’ll start feeling more like a blogger. 

To that end, I have anyway added the words to my spellchecker.

More soon!

END