Monday, December 9, 2019

Dear Reader

Merry Bezosmas everybody!  Welcome to unspeakable (as heck).  I know you have questions.  I will answer them.

Q: Why "unspeakable (as heck)"?

A: Because "unspeakable" was taken.

Q: Why "(as heck)"?

A: Because I was raised to not swear in titles.  Although I would still one day love to write my great American anti-corporate novel: The Fucking Genius.

Q: Why "()"?

A:  What is this, the third degree?

Q: Why doesn't everyone know about unspeakable (as heck)?

A: Some are not as well read as yourself.  Until they are, I keep the place a bit of a secret, which seems to favor the prolificacy of my writing.  I don't know how eager I'd be to continue putting pieces of myself out there if I thought other eyes might be on it, reading it, judging.  I sometimes contemplate the dissonance between the drive to publish pieces at a regular monthly rate that is greater than 0 versus the preference to not be read and it occurs to me that harmony could be restored by not publishing anything at all.  You might think I'd at least publicize to family, friends and acquaintances, but for one reason or another I never have.  I've only told 2 people in my life that I have a blog that I post to (once because it came up in casual conversation and the other time just to plant a seed of knowledge about it in the mind of someone other than myself) but they did not ask where they could find it and I did not volunteer the information. The failure to remember to apprise people of the existence of the place has turned into a determination to keep it under wraps for now.  Originally, I kept it secret as an experiment in how public a non-publicized blog actually is.  I used to wonder about the likelihood of anyone asking me if a blog they came across by chance was mine before I told them I was blogging.  After several years of accumulating page views, I can now safely say that at the rate it is actually stumbled upon based on blogger statistics, it might become a household name by 2582.  On the other hand, life being a series of uncertain events, there may yet be a peculiar day in my lifetime when someone by sheer luck comes across a post of mine, recognizes me by details I impart in it and reaches out for confirmation.

Q:  I found you as the result of a google search. How do you manage to get high enough ranking to be noticed?

A: I wish I knew. In terms of rankings I always aim for my posts to be Number 1 but as readers will attest, it’s a pretty sure thing that they’ll be Number 2.

Q: How much do you get paid to do this?

A: I get out of it what I put into it.  No money changes hands.

Q: You have several original posts each month, month after month going back a number of years on your site.  Are you aware that Google admin has been known to completely remove blogger sites without warning-- that your work could vanish in an instant at the will and whim of an admin? 

A: It is an unfortunate fact, easy to forget,  that my content once published is no longer mine but the property of Google, an obscenely large and vastly powerful operation that is in the sole business of growing itself without limit, whose interest in the fruits of my free labor in the creation of content of substantial quality and personal value to me, is -- to say fickle is to be generous.  No one who is not an owner in our type of society, works, creates, lives except at the will of the owners.  I think this is wrong but this is the situation we find ourselves in in 2019 when we post on Blogger.  I have found moments approaching fulfillment creating my blog, for reasons that are as mysterious to me as they must be to you (and would be to Google as well if the question were pondered by their algorithms).  Creating my blog is both the bane of my existence, and my existence.  It is a big contentious world out there and I know it is partially populated with people who reflexively respond to questionings of conventional thinking and morality or to satirical, impassioned, fringe, experimental or alternative points of view with offense who will now and then complain to Google about them in a desire to destroy them, and that the Google admins responding to complaints do not get paid to treat the creative expression of blogspot content creators with care but rather, solely to promote the interests (in limitless growth) of Google, which jibe with their bloggers' interests only coincidentally if ever.  Where they are judged to clash or if they are not judged to be worth bothering to judge, Google wins.  Those are the terms.  There is an appeals process that I understand sometimes works in the blogger's favor.  It is entirely possible that in acquiring Blogspot in 2003, Google aspired to live up to a responsibility to preserve the online record of the creativity of those humans who provide content for it.  It's possible that a spirit of profound responsibility to protect and preserve the space of public expression that a blog hosting service perhaps truly ought to be yet thrives within the bosoms of Google and the Blogspot admins who maintain the site.  But I'm not so naïve as to think it will be that way tomorrow.  I've lived far too long to expect to be treated with care if I one day find my writings at unspeakable (as heck) in a "disappeared" situation, but for me and for my fellow creators of content for Google, I deeply hope for care from Admins (or Cosmic Void help us, from the algorithm that is surely being written to replace them) if I need it from them.  In the meantime, I back it up.

Q:  Who edits your posts?

A:  I know, right?

Q: Why did the post I read 2 years ago change without any indication?  Do you have no journalistic integrity?

A:  Sometimes, I'm wrong or grammatically incorrect, or prone to perpetrate a mixed metaphor, a solecism or a malapropism or two.  Sometimes when I discover an error, I correct myself after looking at it long enough.  This is not the New York Times or Wikipedia. I don't think people should come here looking for truth, but I'd like them to find it.

Q: Who do you support in the upcoming election?

A:  Labour all the way.

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