All the Blogs Which Might Have Been

It's too bad I don't have an infinite amount of time. If I did, I would no doubt spend waste most of it creating random blogs of senseless beauty. Or perhaps, meaningful blogs of random accuracy. I’d probably make some place-mats also and weave some baskets. But my blogs would be so unique, so full of fantastic assertions, so solipsistic and so pointless so as to make the mind reel and stagger and pour itself another drink. They would feature many uses of the word “so” both at the beginning of sentences and in the middle so that no one would mistake them for anything other than authentic blogs.

Here are a few of the blogs which I would pen. In reading these, you will no doubt weep that they should never be, for alas, I have better things to do with my time. But perchance they will inspire you—yes, even you, dear reader—to aspire to the beautiful random senselessness to create something on your own. After all, you are already wasting time reading this post. Please feel free to plagiarize from these awesome ideas.

1. Frodo did not offer her any tea. This would have been an incredibly deep and satisfying read for the brainy, know-it-all English literature types. The title is, of course, a rather obscure sentence from a mundane passage in J. R. R. Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring.

The tagline would be "A journal about religion, culture, humanoid scaled economies, home-made beer, fancifulness and living at peace with the furry animals in this Middle Earth." It would explain how to make the cities of the world more like the Shire described by Tolkien in his writings using a minimal amount of bulldozers, wrecking balls and cultural displacement. Comments to each post would be greatly encouraged, however anyone misusing the comment boxes to poke fun at or to question the serious ideas presented would have their comments deleted IMMEDIATELY, as would anyone suggesting that the Lord of the Ring series was a work of fiction.

2. My House Is So Cool. If you've ever read a few pages of the now defunct Cottage Living magazine, you might be able to prepare yourself for the tremendously irritating combination of pretentiousness, self-importance and domestic narcissism presented in this would-be blog. The upside for me would be advertising; Cottage Living—sample copies of which were sent to my business address before its demise circa 2007—basically contained 140 pages of advertising. Of course, it is curious that all that advertising didn't keep them in business. I think you also need readers for that. But, hey, I probably would at least get all the readers of the also defunct crunchy blogs by including words like craft beer, conviviality, bungalocity and chestertonianistical . (By the way, I do have a cool house, and the fact that it is usually beat all to hell by kids just makes it cooler.)

3. “Will I still suck at math in Heaven?” – These would be my musings on the ultimate questions about the meaning of life. They would be set forth in a question and answer format, the questions being from kids ranging in age from 4 to 11. I would try to balance the outright heretical ideas by including a number of passages directly plagiarized from the Catechism so it would contain some correct answers. The posts about where babies come from will be the most interesting, but I’ll have to look up a lot of that material; I’m always forgetting how that stuff works.

4. How Green and Orange was my Valley. Tagline: "Oooh, I'll take that crispy little one!" Yes, this would be the crown jewel of all my theoretical blogs, and it would contain nothing but the inside jokes my wife and I have come up with since 2000 when we started dating. The explanations would be tedious, oblique, self-referential and unfunny to most. They would also be especially embarrassing to my wife if she found out I was publishing these. But she would only be embarrassed for a short time before fierce anger set in as she realized I was doing this instead of hacking into the long list of projects she has assigned me. I have no doubt that if I were to do this blog, it would truly be my swan song and that I might never publish another blog again after I, ummm, got caught redhanded.

So there it is—my list of so very excellent and so-so blogs. So. If you do decide to steal any of these ideas and start pouring your imaginative energy into it, good for you! I certainly won’t read it, but a bunch of other idiots will. And you will be well on your way to blog-awesomeness.