Xanga Sucks

So I started clicking on random people's Xanga sites, just to see what's out there.

"it's march 1st! yayyy" reads one post, followed by about 16 comments all reading, approximately, "hi lol!!!1!!1!"

Another poster tells the world, "wow, it's been a month and a day since my last post. weird." He/she (the picture is of a llama) previously wrote about how "im such a slacker with this, sorry it's been forever since i've posted."

One girl describes how "I've been watching Full House a lot lately, it's sucha good show!! It's so sad sometimes, k this is boring". Her boyfriend responds to every post. "love you baby! And I miss having 249 with you a lot."

In pale pink type on a white background, one young man writes "wow it's so nice outside". Twelve people comment on this, saying, for instance, "haha" or "ITS A BEUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEGHBORHODD". This is Featured Content.

More Featured Content, from a different site: "im devil and im here to say im best damn rapper in the USA heayyaa". Six comments, including one prolonged transcript of a chat session, in which sWeEtKiSsEz describes how:

"now greg is calling me a prep cuz i like justin i guess
and i am no way in hell a prep
im a punk/athelete
did u see my outfit today?
total punkish"

Some blogs are meticulous accounts of the writer's daily life. Some seem to be comprised mainly of transcriptions of songs, set against a huge background photograph that makes the text hard to read. Other sites are artful, insightful and/or entertaining. But a lot seem to be just words arranged haphazardly, with a careful precise imperfection. As if you threw a bowl of alphabet soup against the wall, and then went through and misspelled all the words that were accidentally formed.

Then I found a site featuring multi-page essays written by a seventeen-year-old guy:

"After I met the man I sat on a bench in the park and I saw a woman get taken up to heaven and squirrels talk to each other in an unknown language and lives change and exsistences become different. I saw a man who glowed and a man who faded into the background like a chameleon and I only saw him because he was standing by a brick wall and looked like brick and a truck drove past and he could not change quickly enough. So I counted myself lucky."

Every day or two this guy writes these long essays, with fifty or a hundred comments from readers, with raw, adolescent boredom and sadness wrapped up together. There's such a volume of it, imaginative and rough, and edged, as if it's written with charcoal.

I clicked on a link, and was taken to his livejournal page, where he's written even more ... poems, here, and stories, and more traditional blogging in a conversational tone, and it quickly becomes apparent that his xanga page is a certain type of creative outlet for him, and his livejournal is another.

To have an outlet wherein you write the same way every time, where that screen eventually conditions you to adapt a certain mindset, the same way that your e-mail login page conditions you to type your password ... to adopt that sort of discipline as a young writer is very important, I imagine, since I never had it. Here on this page I'll vary wildly in tone and subject matter, as do most of us, and as a result it always takes time to settle into a style for the day, and it's never long until I'm done and the next post will be different, and the style flounders, infant.

Ray Bradbury's an example of someone who's nurtured and developed a style. His words crackle like ball lightning, never settling, dancing alight each concept, daring you to comprehend before they press on into the night. I'm listening to this book on CD, in my car, and when I concentrate and listen it's like standing in a waterfall, weight pouring on me, trying to drink, feeling heavy and elated together.

Oddly, it's very easy to get distracted from this book, sitting in traffic, realizing suddenly that I've been thinking about the chemical composition of jet contrails and a paragraph's gone by and I've missed it. The words are oil-slick, loose and wriggling, and they have to be clutched and examined and tasted, or they slide off and flip away.

When I listen, they crush me, steamrolling with imagery. When I glance away, they pass by; but I glance quickly after and think back and still see the faint afterimage behind my lids. I hear the ringing echo and feel the warmth left in the air from their presence, like Montag in 'Fahrenheit 451'. Even when I don't hear them, they pass through me, speaking directly to my dreams. I drive, late on an empty freeway:

"Three in the morning," thought Charles Halloway, seated on the edge of his bed, "why did the train come at that hour?"

For, he thought, it's a special hour; women never awake, then, do they? They sleep the sleep of babes and children. But men, in middle age: they know that hour well. Oh, God!

Midnight's not bad; you wake, and go back to sleep. One or two's not bad; you toss, but sleep again. Five or six in the morning; there's hope, for dawn's just under the horizon.

But three, now, Christ. Three A.M.

Doctors say the body's at low tide then. The soul is out, the blood moves slow; you're the closest to dead you'll ever be, save dying. Sleep is a patch of death. But three in the morn, full, wide-eyed staring, is living death. You dream with your eyes open. God, if you had strength to rise up, you'd slaughter your half-dreams with buckshot; but no, you lie, pinned to a deep well-bottom that's bone dry.