Blogicide

Pressure of blogging blamed for men's deaths

The deaths of two bloggers were yesterday linked by the US media to an obsession with updating their websites.

— The Times, April 7

To Whom It May Concern:

I cannot go on.

Life is no longer worth living. I have failed myself, my readers, and the Bloggers' Central Committee members who awarded me the plum of Blogger of the Hour. I blame no one but myself, and the shame hangs over me like a clinging metaphor.

Let none say that I have not tried to overcome my self-imposed compulsion. Faced with yet another inner deadline and having no insight, no witty comment on the passing parade, barren even of words of cutting invective, I find there is no help for it.

I have tried every source of inspiration and come away empty handed and empty headed. Stuck my head in books, classic literature and provocative modernism, and felt no spark leap the gap. Drunkenness left me drunk but no more eloquent. Became an Opium-Eater but decided Thomas de Quincy was pulling our leg about its effects on the creative powers. Took long walks in the heaving effulgence of nature and, well, what can you blog about wiping mud off your shoes?

So what is left but to abjure this rough magic. All my blogging thoughts are melted into air, into thin air. Blogs are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little postings are rounded with an empty comments space.

It is only meet, then, that I depart the blogosphere and — what was that other thing? Oh, yes, I remember, life. Being of unsound mind, all my remaining bandwidth I herewith bequeath to generations of bloggers yet unborn, with a strenuous caution: let not the Curse of the Blogger fall on you! When you find the urge has become insatiable, when you wake up trembling with a bitter taste in your mouth from last night's entry, when friends and family urge you to turn your keyboard into a plowshare, heed, o heed!

From one who knows.

Merrill T. Blameworthy

At the sign of the Mouse and Keyboard.