Thursday, September 23, 2010

Where Everybody Doesn't Know Your Name

At my local watering hole, there are two old man barflies whom we avoid at all costs. They are nice, sweet old coots, but are of the type to babble endlessly about random shit. The times we have felt friendly toward them, they've ended up sitting at our table with us for hours, but don't even recognize us the next time we come in.

"Pops" is an 80-year-old veteran, who drives a taxi and collects old coins, keeping several on his person. He has shown them to me and talked about each for at least 20 minutes, in a semi-incoherent manner. I am unsure if it was because he is old and senile, or because he's probably been drinking non-stop for over 60 years. Before he left the bar for the night (whether he was driving his taxi for personal or business reasons is unknown to me), the bar staff knew to bring him a shot of half and half, his "immediate-sober-up" cure.

The other is someone whom we've dubbed "Old Hippie Man", because of his permanent smile and obvious overuse of acid back in the day. I can't remember anything about our unintelligible conversation. He does, however, continually and randomly say, "Carry On!" while making an "Airplane Taking Off" motion with his hand. Even when he gets caught in the middle of bar fights.

Talking to these two, is what it was like for me to read this blog. If the old man barflies were emo Indian girls, that is.

Sheetal rambles on about her feelings and all the wisdom she's gained in all her 23 years. It reads like a journal she's keeping as personal therapy, but it would be better for her to just buy an actual journal, than to expose us all to this shit by submitting here.

You want to know how incoherent and boring this blog is? I have read (maybe skimmed) every single post of every other blog I've reviewed, but I couldn't even get through one of Sheetal's posts. This is why I can't even give links for examples.

She talks about people who haven't been introduced in the blog, as if I'm supposed to figure it out on my own and give a shit about them. Hell, I have no clue about who Sheetal is at all, because there is no "About Me", and I cannot glean anything about her from her posts for the life of me. I mean, I'm assuming Sheetal is female, simply because "she" writes about meeting boys. That may just be coming from my heterocentric view though.

The blog is filled with run-on sentences, misspellings, and huge slabs of meandering, uninteresting paragraphs, which is frightening because apparently, she's a journalist. I fervently pray to Ganesha that her profession doesn't include writing in English, because she has a mediocre grasp of it.

She doesn't post regularly and only has 66 posts for the past 4 years, which I don't even mind, because that means less pollution of the internet.

My advice to Sheetal: Start a new blog, and write stories from your life. Funny memories, sad memories, angry memories, all of it. Readers want to read the blog of someone who puts themselves out there, which means writing about things that make you uncomfortable, not writing down every little emo thought in your little emo head.

Until then, I'm giving you:







For making it feel like I was listening to drunken, brain-fried, old men yammering on about shit no one cares about. Without the luxury of having a beer in my hand.

13 comments:

  1. ...and then I ate a saltine cracker and felt so sad that I had to post another lil' sumpin' sumpin' on my blog. And then it was Tuesday and I got new shoes!

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  2. 'she' used the word 'beautifulest' without any irony. Personally one of my favourite made up words, but as an English teacher, with what was almost a useless degree, I feel I earned the right (write?) to make up words.

    Ooh, and there was a coz. Scorpio will be upset.

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  3. I can't make "coz" not mean something from The Wizard of Oz. I have tried.

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  4. Man... Remind me to avoid her next time I'm in Karnataka, India.

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  5. Has anyone besides me read Stephen King's The Shining? Not a paragon of fine English literature, but a fun page turner. So I bring it up merely because I read three paragraphs of Sheetal's first post and all I could think of was Harold, the poor, maniacal, love-crazed-turned-evil-terrorist Harold and his journal that he just filled with verbal diarrhea.

    Like I tell my significant other on occasion when I feel like getting smacked, not every thought you have needs to be expressed.

    And I quit reading before I got to 'coz.' Thanks for the warning, Miss Ash.

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  6. Errr, Grumpy warned me. Ash referenced it. Sorry.

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  7. Most of the old man barflies I know are secret Indian emo girls.

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  8. Also, most of the blogs I read don't have a background that looks like a shitty cowboy romance novel.

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  9. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  10. Speaking as someone from Bangalore, Karnataka, India, gotta say - we're all not like her. I'm going to hurl now.

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  11. Sheetal is a girl's name, which means soft, fragile or delicate depending on how you use it. You're all welcome for this bit of Friday trivia.

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  12. But Rass, it's one of the beautifulest cowboy templates evah!

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  13. The template is fucking ace.

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Grow a pair.