The Sarge has announced that he's taking a break from blogging until he thinks of something new to say. Ken Layne writes what many others are thinking and saying:
Dear Sarge:
Take a break, get some sun, come back when you're ready. I've quit this site a dozen times. I come back when it's fun again.
The second sentence is uncomfortably close to the old line "I can quit drinking any time I want. I’ve done it a thousand times".
By the way, can anyone identify the author? And did he (she?) say 'drinking' or 'smoking' or some other vice? I can't remember. Perhaps blogging has destroyed too many brain cells. Not to mention destroying my attention span and making me digress like this. Anyway, . . . .
Ken and the Sarge say they can quit any time, they say they can stay away from demon blog as long as they want. Ken doesn’t want to just yet, but Sarge is going to give it a try right now. In their hearts they both know the true nature of their addiction. They know the whole pitiful story:
You start out just reading a few blogs, to kill time when you’re waiting for your boss to give you some boring assignment or other. Or maybe you’ve always been curious about something your trendier friends have been doing for years. Next thing you know you’re checking in every day, for hours at a time, even when it's a beautiful day or you have urgent work to do, and your list of essential blogs is approaching triple digits. Then comes your first comment on someone else’s blog. Someone -- maybe even the blog-owner! -- replies to your comment, and agrees with you. You send a tip to Sullivan or the Instapundit, and he uses it! The rush is un-freakin-believable, man! Now you’re hooked. Soon you’re lying awake half the night screaming for a blog of your own. Your trendy friends give you the name of someone who can get you started on the hard stuff, a trustworthy supplier named Ev or Ben or Mena. Once you’re up and running, you can’t stop checking your hit count and referrer logs, updating and posting, uploading and reloading, over and over for hours at a stretch, like a lab monkey with a push-button cocaine-drip: it’s just too pleasant to stop. Every morning you wake up hungry for more, roll up your sleeves, plug into your keyboard, and feel the sweet sweet blog soak into your consciousness. You spend the whole day in a blissful fog. (Why do you think they call it ‘bl-og’?) And when the blog wears off at the end of a very late evening, you crawl off to bed, saying 'That’s the last time. Really. I can quit any time I want'. In your heart you know it’s a lie. You’re a slave to cruel Lady Blog. You start trying to get more friends interested. Pretty soon all your friends are serious bloggies. Now you know where to go for the good stuff, the urgent fixes. When one of the more reliable suppliers is no longer on his streetcorner, it drives you half-insane. VodkaPundit takes a whole week off: doesn’t he care about his customers? PejmanPundit goes out on a date and doesn’t come back on-line until late the next morning: you’re waiting for him when he checks in. InstaPundit belies his name by spending time with his family for almost an entire day: the lack of new posts gives you cold sweats and the shakes. And his archives have disappeared, too, so you can't link to the post that would prove it. Now the Sarge has gone silent and he won’t even tell us for how long. I can’t take it! Give me my blog! For God's sake give me my blog!
Hmmm, maybe it's not the Sarge who's the addict here . . . ?
You'll be back, Sarge, and sooner than you think.
Posted by Dr. Weevil at April 16, 2002 09:11 PM