Some notes on being a nobody; or What is Biscuit For?

A few days back I posted a quote from Pandagondiscussing the problem that nobody in the Dem party establishment seems to take blogger advice anyway, so what's the point of all our blogging?

If even bloggers whose audience can be numbered in the thousands and tens of thousands are basically engaged in a conversation that goes nowhere, what about blogs like Biscuit, who can count their readers on the fingers of one hand? (Well, two, on a good day). Since Biscuit is a nobody, what possible, useful, purpose can be served by Biscuit's blog? Does Biscuit have nothing better to do?

Actually Biscuit has many theoretically more pressing things to do. Biscuit's 20-month-old is rummaging in a box of what could only generously be called 'crap'. Hecate only knows what might be in there that he could get himself into trouble with. Biscuit is glad to be a touch-typist, and watches toddler while attempting to think in complete sentences.

So why blog? What is Biscuit for?

I have several answers to this question, but I'll have to put them in several posts.

Answer #1: The Biscuit Report is my defense against reality.

I don't mean that it is not reality-based; Biscuit is most certainly a member of the reality-based community. What I mean is that everyone has defenses that allow them to live in a world in which Abu Ghraib or [insert other horrible things here] happens. Some people defend by ignoring reality. Some people defend by not feeling it. They know it's there, but they don't really want to look into that abyss. The guilt and horror and fear of that abyss is nasty stuff. There is a hell of a lot of bad news these days, lots of bad shit going down, and yet people need to get on with their lives too. So, defenses.

Me, I'm having what my shrink calls "some breakthrough symptoms" of my DSM IV 296.3, Major Depressive Disorder, recurrent. One of the charming things about this is that I have none of the ordinary defenses against reality. Also, I am afflicted with crippling guilt. So here I am: I see and feel the utter horror of some of the things going on today, and I am overwhelmed by guilt about them. I feel helpless and frustrated and guilty. I can't not pay attention, and I can't not feel awful about what I see when I pay attention, and I can't understand how everyone doesn't feel the same urgency I do about how very wrong things are going. I mean, I know a lot of people do feel this urgency, but they can also get on with their lives. But I am riveted.

I am in this position because of the disease I have, but the disease is not responsible for Abu Ghraib, for Guantanamo, for Alberto Gonzales and missile defense and tax cuts for the wealthy and our impending economic crisis and unsecured nukes in Russia and dead Iraqi children and traumatized soldiers and people with their legs blown off. The disease is not responsible for GWB's election, or the outing of Valerie Plame, the stolen 2000 election, Diebold, the EPA's unethical attempts to study infant exposure to pesticides, and members of Congress who think that doctors who perform abortions should be executed.

So the blog is a makeshift defense I have invented to help me cope with the temporary lack of the ordinary kind of defenses that other people have to keep them from going mad. My defense is to try to break through other peoples' defenses. So I write about what I see that other people may not see, and I write about how it makes me feel, because other people may not feel it. I write so that other people can be forced, for a moment, to encounter some painful realities. I do not know if I succeed. But if I do not try, then the disease is just a disease, and I am just alone in my horror and guilt and despair.

Heh. After that long and overly-melodramatic tale of how blogging gives my mental illness meaning, probably no one has stuck around to see what I might have to say that's applicable to other, non-mentally-ill bloggers. Also, the above does not address the original issue, which is that I'm nobody, so who exactly do I think is reading this blog and having all these amazing revelations about the state of the world, and saying "thank Yoruba for Biscuit, without whom I would still be seeing through a glass darkly."

So that's what my second answer will be about, when I have time to write it.