Let's learn to blog like Rod Dreher

I know there are a bunch of you out there asking yourselves, "Why am I busting my hump working at a real job when I could be making money telling the world all about myself online instead?"

Well, today's your lucky day. Today we'll learn step by step how to blog like Rod Dreher using a tutorial post he's generously provided for just that purpose.

Now, if you're going to edit, notate, and "curate" your blog and its comments - because, in the final analysis, how much different is Rod Dreher's blog (or yours!) from a museum like the Louvre when it comes to "curating"? - first and foremost you're going to need a naturally docile and slavishly sympathetic readership. So the first thing to do is to establish yourself early and often as an existentially victimized object of perpetual sympathy for the widest possible audience. You, grasshopper, are a slice of soft, white bread a-sail on the seas of sympathy gravy. You sop, therefore you exist.

It really doesn't matter what that victimizing factor is: a religion that failed you, a mysterious malady that provides you with regular cat-naps, a childhood penpal friend who dies, even a close family member who departs at an extremely opportune time. The important thing is that you leave no quarter for any existing shut-in Great Aunt Gertie, her GG bosom powdered to avalanche danger, or her petulant, failed-to-launch 36-year-old grand-nephew Wurlitzer, or Wurlitzer's tenure-free adjunct Professor of Verbiage Loris, or Loris's understandably yearning wife Almond, or any other remotely emotionally trigger-happy creature to escape every possible opportunity to feel sorry for you, wish you were better, and thus naturally want to do anything to help to make it all better for you. Like, for example, blindly acceding to the rules of your universe and all the thinking that governs it. Others, be gone. Did you get a boo-boo today? Blog it.

The next step is to constantly work topical material into your act, the more provocative the better, regardless of whether or not it's in any way pertinent or germane to anything you're saying. These days, for example, anything "Duck"-Robertson will do. In our tutorial post, frankly, an arbitrarily chosen Willie would have served just as well as the arbitrarily chosen Si (Gertie has apparently become temporarily weary of Phil), but Si has more of that Phil-as-not-Phil gravitas you wanted to push, so you used Si. And of course - a fundamental principle in its own right to never forget - it's not as if anyone can prove anything you're blogging didn't happen just as you say it did. This is also why you curate an obeisantly sympathetic readership: it would be a matter of being just plain mean to an obviously suffering person (you) not to believe any event you relate at face value. So they will and do. And therefore your reader will readily believe on his own accord that Si rather than Phil or Willie must have come up in some unblogged part of the blogged conversation, because no reason to mention him is given in the blogged part.

Now it's at this point that things may get a little technical, but if you want to become a blogger like Rod Dreher rather than working for a living you'll hang in there. It involves something we could call auto-deep-linking (like auto...whatever): in this case, linking back into a previously published post in your own blog so as to provide it with hits again from a different source and to tie both posts together.

In this post, Miriam dies tragically, far too young, from breast cancer, and her verbosely blogged death serves its greater purpose, lining your readers up in the milking shed. However, in this, our tutorial post, Miriam is now not only already dead, but also already sympathy-blogged post mortem. So what purpose other than redundancy does another mention of her serve?

Ah! I see you're beginning to catch on, grasshopper. As the Big Lebowski (long may he abide) would say, she becomes the rug which ties the whole room together. Her function as an auto-deep-link is really secondary: her primary function is to become the reason for the Facetime conversation (if it even ever actually happened, and no sympathetic reader would doubt it did) to have occurred at all. Without Miriam, no trifecta Facetime conversation which reprises sympathy, deep-links to a previous post, and miraculously offers up another conveniently gratuitous serving of Duck.

Why Si? At this point, really, why not?

So this is how you blog like Rod Dreher: sympathy, gratuitous topical references, unfalsifiable narratives, recycling and re-purposing the dead, and auto-deep-linking rugs to tie the whole room together.

Oh - I also threw a tag in for TLWORL on my post here for none other than the same reason Rod pulled Uncle Si (rather than Phil, Willie, etc.) out of thin air: so that anyone searching on that phrase might be baited into clicking on my post.