No Doot About It

I don't always notice these milestones, but it came to my attention that this is my 700th post here at Murrmurrs. So it seemed like maybe I should take stock or something. There are a lot of people who were blogging before I came on the scene, but the scene in general has petered out. Fewer people blog, and even fewer pay any attention to those who do.

But I'm still here. I'm here with a reduced number of readers, but I'm pretty sure that those people still dropping by are sincere and pure at heart and have come here of their own free will, and also they're bored at work.

You're supposed to have a theme. You're a quilter, or you're a Mommy, or you're an irascible political junkie with grindable axes. Everyone knows what to expect of you. With me, you don't know exactly what I'm going to write about--you couldn't, because I don't--but I do wear some of the same paths smooth. I care a lot about the environment and extinction, and the wholesale destruction of the global systems that had been sustaining us and our fellow planetary passengers for quite a long time. I'm interested in poop. And I seem to be really hard on Republicans, which would be totally unfair and unbalanced, except that they have so got it coming. They are assholes nine ways to Sunday, the whole lot of them. They want their nests feathered with stuff they've plucked off of you, and then they want to tell you to get your own damn sweater and oh by the way how many eggs you should raise.

So here's an example. Found this the other day, at the 5000-foot elevation of one of our local volcanoes. I don't know if this is poop or not. It looks like poop, but it also looks like some other kind of non-digestive consequence of some little critter's shovelings or perambulations; or even something that water did to dirt in its spare time. I poke around in doots just to see if any clues pop out, and if they don't, I slap their picture on the internet like this so someone smarter than I am can tell me what they are. These look to be made of plain dirt.

I mean, I would totally support a Republican, on principle, if I agreed with him, but on every single dag-blasted issue I care deeply about, and all the second- and third-tier ones too, they've got everything totally fucking upside-down. The solution to the climate situation is to declare it doesn't exist until they're done drilling out all the money. The solution to the obscene concentration of wealth in a few individuals is to make damn sure they're not taxed. The solution to gun violence is more guns. The solution to unaffordable health care is really unaffordable health care. The solution to abortion is discouraging contraception. The solution to the problem of gay marriage is--wait, what problem? They're insane. They'll bang a pulpit one minute and a young boy the next, and gin up five reasons to go to war on the way to prayer breakfast. They've got the word of the Lord at one end and the tailpipe of the pirate class at the other, and in between is the vacant space where they allege there might be a tangible soul worthy of protecting. No matter how thoroughly they fuck something, they won't pull out. The only thing they'd like better than lining their pockets is if they could stash the cash in a wallet made from the scrotum of an endangered tiger.

The nicest thing you can say about them is they don't mean a damn thing they say. Take the Mexican immigrants. They love them. They love the cheap labor, and they don't plan to do a thing about it. But they'll sure as hell use them to pry up votes.

Ruined water, ruined air, ruined lives, squandered resources, hypocrisy, and sanctimony. Poke around this kind of shit long enough, you know exactly where it comes from.

One Hundred Cheers Of Jollitude

Grab yourself a little piece of that cake over there, and make sure you have a glass of champagne. This here is my 100th post in Murrmurrs! No one is surpriseder than I am. When I started, I would have sworn I didn't have a hundred ideas, total, lifetime. But here we are. My head is jammed full of stuff. As Dave likes to point out, it's really dense in there.

You should have a purpose in mind when starting a blog: to educate, to chronicle, perhaps to provoke. My goal is to cause a leakage of bodily fluids in my readership. If I can make you have to change your underwear or wipe something off your screen, I'm happy. That's where the cake and champagne come in. Everything reminds me of something else, and there's usually no more than one or two degrees of separation before you hit funny. So I think of something, and that makes me think of something else, and that makes me think of something else, and if I can remember what I started with--by no means a sure thing--why, I'm off and running.

I wrote my first post on December 27th, 2008, and my second a day later, and the Blogger template made it look real purty so I went ahead and told both of my friends, and then I settled into a comfortable twice-a-week schedule. Now, there's a lot of information out there about having a successful blog, and one thing everyone agrees on is that you should post at least three times a week. Call me a crank, but my thought is that no one will look at a blog three or more times a week unless it's entertaining. I searched my heart and decided I could only be funny twice a week, and you don't even want to be around me those other days.

Actually, I'm fun to be around slightly more often than twice a week. I began to accumulate blog posts which I confine to a little kennel on my computer. I have a pack of at least fifteen of them ready to let loose. At any given time a few will be under construction, and about three of them will be told to go to their crates until they funny up a little more. I worry when I put out a post that I think is pretty funny but not very funny. I always think: well, there goes my audience. Same thing applies when I put in one with a political or religious theme, which I seem unable to prevent myself from doing. "That one will drive people away," I fret, but then I think: No. My readers are smart and delightful and agree with me on every last thing. Right? Right?

But even though I have a group of posts just yipping to be let out, I decided not to increase the output to three times a week. That would be more pressure than a retired and, frankly, slothful person should be expected to bear. Especially one who isn't getting paid.

That getting-paid thing has been an eye-opener. I started the blog to develop an audience, which you need before anyone will publish your book. I'd still like to get a book published, but I discovered that having an audience was most of what I wanted. It's almost as if my readers are the people standing in the forest with their ears peeled, and I'm the tree that falls down. If they weren't there, would I make a sound? I'm not at all sure that I would. So you people are drawing out my work, and that energizes me and makes me very happy, for which I thank you all.

Wherever you came from. I haven't hit the big time, but I do have more readers than I have friends, so something's going on. Now, a person could conceivably trip over my site just by Googling the right thing. For instance, if you type in "ferret snot," I'm right there in the number-one position out of 400,000 hits. (Dave Barry is number three, people.) Most of my readers live in Oregon, which tells me they're my friends or their friends. But a goodly percentage, when I dig into it, are birders. This means my friend Julie Zickefoose sent them. Which brings up another thing:

I didn't know much about the so-called blogosphere before I began bobbing around in it. But here's one thing I found out: it's got friends. I now have friends I've never met, but friends they are. My head says "those are just names on a screen," but my heart, a much better judge of such things, has already brought over a bottle of wine, checked out the fridge, and curled up under an afghan on the sofa. It's the real thing.

Regular readers will have learned a lot about me. I'm muddle-headed, I tip over a lot, and I live with a cat and a large man, both of whom are total goofs. I like beer and flowers and salamanders, I'm a big chubby liberal, and I'm probably going to hell. That's me in a nutshell.

I always thought I'd be a writer. I wrote a lot of bad poetry in school and some exceptionally bad fiction. After that, I didn't write much of anything for over thirty years. They say that you need to live a little to have something to write about, and I think that's true. What did thirty years of living prepare me to write about? Poop.

I checked back, and at least eighteen of my posts are either about poop or mention poop (in passing). I've written about lizard poop, and bat poop, and raccoon poop, and sandhill crane poop. Possum poop, people poop and the poop of the potoroo. Hamster doots. Quark shit, for crap's sakes. I don't know what this says about me, but I will report that my poop posts get a lot of commentary. However, the post that got the most comments of all was about erections. That says a lot about you.

Here's a little primer about comments, for those of you not in the know. You can click on the little "comments" line at the end of every post and put in a comment. It will ask you how you want to be known, and you can be anonymous. But if you wanted to create a Google account, and have your name and picture and everything right there, I'm here to tell you that it's free and easy and no one seems to hound you about anything afterwards, so go for it. Also, if you want to send a particular post to somebody, you can click on "share this." I won't stop you. If you want to email all your friends about Murrmurrs, I will encourage you while blushing at the same time, which is all the multitasking I can handle without tipping over. If you want to put a link to Murrmurrs on your Facebook page, I will lick your feet and bake cookies.

Thank you all for coming. In the spirit of the season, Post #101 will be about poop.

Here are a few of my favorite posts, excavated from the archives, which you can find at the left:

We The People

Loved Ones, With A Side Of Lefse

Requiem For A Biology Degree

Speaking Phlegmish

Pimp My Platform

Here's how I thought the writing business should play out: I would go sit in a tower and write a really cool book. I would polish it up and present it in a form that required no editing, and pass it briefly under the nose of an agent or publisher, who would detect the scent of genius and promptly fling out thousands of copies to a waiting world.

I didn't actually write much of anything for about 52 years, but I did have a tower, so I had a good start. Then my friend Dave Gerritsen gave me some sort of choice--I believe one of the options was "get off the pot"--and I started writing some stuff down. It went well. I got a little something published, I won a couple little contests, and then I revised my plan. I had gotten some free publicity as a result of winning the contests, and so I thought I'd just sit in the front room, in literary heat, and whack at the agents and publishers with a broom as they crowded around the front porch; I'd let one or two with impeccable bloodlines stay. Meanwhile, I'd write a book.

The book was coming right along, but the front porch was kind of quiet. So I joined a writers' community and went to a meetin'. The preacher at the meetin' house soberly informed us that we needed to develop a Writer's Platform. My platform is pretty well developed, I've always thought, although it's nothing that couldn't be handled with stretchier pants. But I had misunderstood. In order to get a book contract, we needed to prove to a publisher that we could personally sell books, because they weren't about to be responsible for that. Heavens no. And the way to do that was not just to write a good book; certainly not. We needed to read in the town square, get a column in the paper, give commentaries on the radio, advertise on bus benches, wear spangly outfits and hire a bugler. Really, the writing was secondary.

So with great sadness and trepidation, I decided to start a blog. I didn't want to. What if I had only twelve ideas in my whole head, and after I had sent them out for free, there would be nothing left? Well. It turned out that I can go on and on about virtually any little thing. I had no idea. My husband Dave knew, and has made his peace with that over the years, but I didn't. It turned out to be fun. It's like a big paperweight for flyaway thoughts. All those odd little ideas that go traipsing in and out of my brain (there being, literally, nothing to stop them) now get pinned down in one place.

The book I'm writing is tentatively titled Miss Delivery: A Substantially True Postal Memoir. It's in the polishing stages. If you want to see it all published and everything, here's all you have to do: tell ten of your friends to read Murrmurrs. Tell them to tell ten of their friends. Within three or four weeks, we should have most of the planet on board unless some of you have duplicate friends--try not to do that. And don't break the chain or I'll have bad luck. Okay, pop along now--you should be able to do this before breakfast.

Incidentally: the blog posts that seem to engender the most spirited commentary are the ones about poop. I have written about it several times (raccoon poop, possum poop, lizard poop). Clearly, it speaks to something deep inside us all.

The Diaryer

This is the first day of my blog, unless you count the ones I spent procrastinating. I did a little reconnaissance on the web, and it turns out the web had room for one more blog, so I thought: might as well be this one. There's really only one downside to this venture, and that is the fact that I will have to use the word "blogger" from time to time, which, as has been pointed out previously by others, is an unhandsome word. I scouted about for a replacement, but all I could come up with was "diaryer", which has problems of its own.

Another potential drawback is that this might take some time. But I thought I could reallocate some of the time I devote to staring into space, and stare at an empty screen instead, and it might be just as satisfying. We just had ourselves an unusual white Christmas here, and I had nowhere I needed to go, so I spent some of it gazing at the snow. There were little birdie feetprints in it--that never fails to charm--and there were also a few mystery holes, with steam wafting out, left by the guest dogs we hosted for the last few days. I'm hoping, as I stare at the empty screen, I can produce more feetprints than steaming holes.

I plan to do a little observing, and a little poking around in my memory, which I can count on to be unreliable. It'll be interesting to see what-all is in there, since I suspect any resemblance to reality is likely to be thin. I always find life interesting, but then again--as people tell me when they're feeling charitable--I'm easily amused. Just the other day, a sunbeam came in and illuminated a particularly valiant dust bunny charging out from under my bed, and when I went to fetch it, I noticed: huh. There's enough material here to make an actual bunny. So I spent the next ten minutes trying to prod lint into little ears and tails. The results didn't really meet my artistic standards, but at least I wasn't wasting time. At any rate, if my life isn't interesting, I have no compunction about making stuff up. That's already what I do with my past. I don't know if my memories correspond to actual events, or if I've slabbed them together out of bits of photographs and fancies and stories from the grownups. But as I recall it, my childhood, fictional though it may be, was pretty grand. The present is fogging over as fast as it rolls out. I can get two or three readings out of a mystery novel before I begin to suspect whodunit. I won't remember what you just told me, and I'm not all that sure how to navigate to the end of my own sentences. Sometimes, when I finally beach myself on my own point, I'm as surprised as anyone. What won't I think of next? So inasmuch as I've gotten myself this far without an operating memory, I think the odds are good that I can make up my future too. Maybe that's what I'm doing here.