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Out Of The Closet Into The Blog

Filed under: HOAG Site, Self-Referential | By DrHGuy | April 6, 2008 at 1:20 pm



Awakening The Monster

It started innocently.

At the time - a week or two ago - it seemed like a good idea.

I would rearrange1 the books, papers, files, folders, print-outs, food wrappers, ads, and other detritus which cluttered the area around my desk and an adjacent closet in hopes of diminishing the chaos into which my life had descended during my walker-bound summer of 2007, a period during which my philosophical bearings shifted from a classic Kierkegaardian dialectic filtered through my homespun variant of Descartes’ epistemology to a core belief that the essence of what makes one civilized, distinguishing and protecting us from the barbarians, infidels, and philistines always encamped around the perimeter of ones life, at the ready to storm any breach in the defenses, is the capacity to position every item that might be needed in the next 24 hours within an arm’s reach.

And, yes, I am aware that this sorting, assessment, and redistribution of matter could have been completed any time since I re-evolved the capacity for bipedal locomotion some four months ago. To apply the sports cliché of the moment, it is what it is.

Isn’t it?

It is.

What it is, that is.



An Aside Re The DrHGuy Twitter Risk2
I now find it incumbent to allay the fears of those currently wondering if the blogging of my concerns about cleaning my office are a signal that I have succumbed to twittering3 my life away in trivia-projectiles aimed at readers.

No, I describe the cleaning of Augean Closet4 because it has since expanded into …

An All-encompassing Obsession

I fear that - sigh - I feel compelled to put my life in order. You know, actually look at those legal papers and contracts I stuck in that drawer (I think) eight years ago, the ones that the feature articles in The Trib recommend one review yearly. Perhaps I’ll even plan something beyond avoiding problems. Heck, I might even figure out a way to make a buck. That sort of thing.

As one might guess, this will not be an afternoon’s work. And, until I reach homeostasis or come to my senses, whichever comes first, this spring cleaning-priority setting-life agenda writing-maintenance maintaining effort will displace much of the time I usually devote to creating Heck of a Guy posts.


In The Meantime, …

Legendarily abhorrent of a vacuum, however, nature has revealed a source of raw material for blog content via serendipity. Among the mass of material to be sorted, sieved, massaged, and rearranged are a batch of files originally gathered for their potential as shrapnel for the Heck of a Guy howitzers.

Consequently, lucky readers will now enjoy the bounty of content that was once considered to be, to maintain the metaphor, potentially deadly.

For example, the following will, for the immediately ensuing, indeterminate period, be considered an exemplary post:

The Esquire - Heck of a Guy Probably Headline Insertion Comparison

From Esquire, December 12, 2007, page 46:



From Heck Of A Guy, July 6, 2006:5


Today’s Parting Admonition

As per my Eighth Grade Class Motto,

Onward Ever, Backward Never



Footnotes


  1. Note the modesty of the task I set for myself at the time - I would “rearrange” things and, if that went well, perhaps then escalate my efforts to “straighten things out.” In any case, I eschewed more ambitious alternatives such as “organizing.” ~back~
  2. Does an aside about Twitter qualify as an atwitter ~back~
  3. For the six people in America who read blogs but don’t know about Twitter, “Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send ‘updates’ (or ‘tweets;’ text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific. Fans say they [Twitter and similar services] are a good way to keep in touch with busy friends. But some users are starting to feel ‘too’ connected, as they grapple with check-in messages at odd hours, higher cellphone bills and the need to tell acquaintances to stop announcing what they’re having for dinner.” The preceding description is excerpted from Wikipedia ~back~
  4. I have always found depictions of the cleaning of the Augean Stables spectacularly unimpressive. Wikipedia reports that The fifth of the Twelve Labours set to Herakles/Hercules was to clean the Augean stables in a single day. The reasoning behind this being set as a labour was twofold: firstly, all the previous labours exalted Heracles in the eyes of the people and this one would surely degrade him; secondly, as the livestock were a divine gift to Augeas they were immune from disease and thus the amount of dirt and filth amassed in the uncleaned stables made the task surely impossible. However, Heracles succeeded by rerouting the rivers Alpheus and Peneus to wash out the filth. These are the two most common classical art pieces associated with the Cleansing of the Augean Stables.


    As one who grew up on a small farm, I assure you that these images provide a totally inadequate sense of what it means to muck out a barn housing a few cows, let alone clean out the by-products of thousands of cattle and goats. ~back~

  5. See also

    ~back~

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2 Comments

  1. really good words - any chance of talking you into plugging live words back in - it did work fine until i misused it - and is the wheretheheck search working right?

    Comment by ben — April 6, 2008 @ 3:57 pm

  2. Ben -
    WhereTheHeck Search was indeed broken. It looks as though Google changed their code a bit. That plus the recent WordPress upgrade seems to have done WhereTheHeck in. It should be working now. As for Live Words,I’m happy to give it another chance, but it will probably be a day or two before I can re-install it.

    Comment by DrHGuy — April 6, 2008 @ 6:09 pm

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