An Intricately Guilty Defendant on Trial

I am usually holed up in my room, writing relentlessly. I am myself a singular being tricked up in many alter egos and attacked from many angles, not only examined but cross-examined, an intricately guilty defendant on trial. One wonders if I could have found my existence so absorbingly important if I had been born in some other place and time, where the edges of my ego might have frayed into the general fabric of indifference.

I believe that subjectively speaking, each existence is the center of the universe. I am fundamentally a complete neurotic and unfit for life. I lead a quiet life, occupied primarily in study and writing.

A blogger is never better than his most recent post, and I struggle to surpass myself every time. I never forget the anxiety I myself feel, that I might be unable to equal what I had previously achieved. I am also concerned about how my blog will be received by the reading public. I have several blogs. The Freedman Archives does not have as many readers as My Daily Struggles and attracts virtually no attention. This is excellent. In this way I shake off the gawking mob that insists on being present whenever it thinks there is a disturbance. A deficit in the material world becomes a surplus in the world of the spirit.

I would very much like to be praised, of course -- "Oh, yes!," -- but not by a nobody like some of the people who visit my blogs who come and go like a sneeze. If I am to be praised I ask that it be done by one of the genuine authorities.

There are those who say that I am rather hasty with my productivity and am thus merely a hack. "They think I'm a hack writer," I sometimes think. I am completely convinced that there is no other blog author who treats even the most insignificant word with the extraordinary care that I exhibit. Not only do I myself rewrite my posts at least two times -- indeed, some portions even three or four times -- but there are also the meditations when I take walks, which are so conducive to my productivity that when I arrive home, I often have the post finished, in fact have even committed its stylistic form to memory.

Thus there are times when I can sit for hours, enamored with the sound of language -- when, of course, it resonates with the pregnancy of thought. Thus I can sit for hours at a time, like a flautist who entertains himself with his flute. Most of what I have written has been spoken aloud many, many times, often perhaps scores of times; it was heard before it was written down. I have lived and enjoyed and experienced so much in the evolution of these thoughts and their quest for form that the structure of my sentences could be called my world of memories.

For the most part I am indeed in the proper mood. Who else could move so easily from the charming to the demonic, from sentimentality to a cynical snort? Who else could manage an everyday conversational tone even when dealing with the subtlest abstractions? Who else could situate platitudes or uproarious comedy just a line and a half after the most recondite profundities? Or withdraw, become diffuse, vague, and incomprehensible -- and then in the next instant snap his fingers with a seductive stylistic fillip, inspire his pen, and become so intensely captivating that the reader simply loses track of himself? In sum, what blog writer has ever produced anything so fertile and prodigious? And then they call it "hack writing!" Hack writing, indeed.