The Active Life-O what a pity.

That’s a line from the writings of Chuang Tzu, Chinese sage and ever-flowing fountain toadstool.

The current such pity of my life is that I have to work but would rather not.  Yes, I know that sounds peremptorily stereotypical, but in actuality, this, for me, is a most recent development attributable purely to the madness that is Xanga.  For prior to coming on-blog, work obsessed me.  Sixty hours a week was almost underly-distinctive, eighty hours not a blue moon.  And I used to rejoice in the battle-quest of work.  It challenged me to remain indefatigable.  Kept me always in the moment.  Damned death to an unimaginable if not ever-postponable quiescence.  O yes, when I worked beyond mania, even the Grim Reaper felt cheaply scammed for I had stolen the Great Coyote-Trickster’s animus and had coaxed it to sustain me sine qua non laborious, the-word-be-damned.  So active was my life that I didn’t even have the chuangtzuan luxury of contemplating O what a pity, but rejoiced in e.e.cummings observation: “Life is too much being everything to seem anything, catastrophic included.” 

That’s right.  Batteries included.  

Then once upon the fateful day of 12-20-00, the seductress that was Bianca that was Xanga (and anonymously Anonymiss) found me.  And she discovered my Achilles’ weakness, a formerly unidentified yet unquenchable craving to blog.  And remorsely activated it.  Then slurped at it subscribingly, inducingly.   And even when we discovered that Bianca was a farce and that Xangods were predominantly if not exclusively male, and I saw this slight of seduction with its overtinge of femme fatale sexuality to be practically gay, I still succumbed, already smitten.  And from those days onwards, Work, my dear most active goddess Work, has found me a reluctant and sometimes negligent lover.  For blogging, Bianca or Bianca-less,  foremost was To Be. 

And so has Xanga ruined me and shattered my bid for Industrial Immortality.  And all of you, all 500 of my subscribers are partly to blame.  And to think that in midsummer past I had imagined I would retire-renounce-leave upon reaching the 500th subscriber milestone ( roadblock! stigma! infamy! )  Yet here, yesterday, upon that very attainment, this maya— (this—what I’m doing right now!) yet grips me and blog-thirsty I remain. 

Well, I’ll get you yet my little-pretties, just you wait and see.  And your pet eProps, too.

Meanwhile, thanks for all the fish.