Correcting trash

Except on days where you pick up the wrong newspaper (thinking it to be that day’s edition), mostly what you do with old papers is put them out in a grocery bag for the recycling guys to gather up and convert into something useful, like coffee filters. When I think of people who actually save newspapers, I think of batty hermits who are later found in their shacks in the mountains, with yellowed stacks of newsprint dating back to World War I.

But blogs – as far as I know, they can go on forever. Moreover, the “archives” bar gives the illusion of saved, catalogued, and archived master work, almost as if you were letting it reside in the great library of the British Museum (which purports to have everything ever printed). The storage bar more accurately should be called “trash.”

Because in truth, what current reader ever goes into Archives? Or even to yesterday’s posts? “Oh, let me run through her life just one more time. I may have missed a nuance to the story on the first three readings...”

Well, I did just that this morning – I revisited a couple of older posts on my own blog and on one or two other blogs. Why did I do it? For one, in a moment of great impatience and lacking self-restraint, I had read most of the Times headlines and all online inserts prior to this morning, so that most of the stories were already old news by the time the paper touched the driveway. And, I seemed incapable of figuring out when Meet the Press was on TV, having never watched anything on a Sunday morning in my life. I wanted to catch Nader’s big moment and, instead, I got some odd gent telling me to act now and fill out a ‘survey’ (?) against the ACLU – an organization devoted to teaching school children about gay unions and disarming our leaders of the ability to fight terrorism (almost verbatim from the show). So it was back to the computer for me.

Looking at old posts made me realize two things:
1. I had let some hideous grammatical constructions creep their way into many a post;
2. Occasional, once spotted by me (in an unusual moment of lucidity) grammatical bloopers in others’ posts had been corrected.

Naturally, I did the thing any blogger would do, I “managed” my old posts and cleaned up the two or three that I had read and that now were making me ill (“I used that awkward phrase for WHAT reason?”).

But the question is this: what presumptuous thought was making me correct? Who cares how awful it read – once posted, it’s a done deal. Except for a few stragglers and an occasional new reader, your readership will have moved on. They are now jumping around picking up the latest from blog X Y Z, you are HISTORY until your next post.

Sad but true.

To the loyal readers who continue to log on here even after reading that bit about reclining, both in the chair and in October – you are too kind. To the blogger who went back and clarified a sentence that was cutely suspended without a context – I appreciated your effort even if, most likely, no one else did.

But I do have a new definition of pathetically delusional: “as in: going back to your archives from many months back and correcting the grammar of your old blog posts.”