Sometimes I find myself caught in a mad texting or messaging rant with a friend, my brother, or sometimes a virtual stranger. I once called this phenomena 'riff-texting', referencing the way the quick repartee of the instant message can resemble musicians going off on melodic tangents. Off topic and most often ridiculous, both of these phenomena have an emergent quality.
Before the age of computers and thumb-typing my brother and I engaged in something called "whimsical bantering", which involved a conversational form of the riff-text. Funny voices and free association abounded in these interchanges. After my brothers left home and I was left to my own devices, my predilection for the absurd found an outlet at the keyboard. As a kid I spent some post-schoolday afternoons hanging out at my mother's office (which was by the way, a place devoted to the highly technical world of medical illustration and film making but populated almost entirely by bohemian artists) and turned my hand to the keyboard. The keyboard in question was, at the time, a highly advanced form of typewriter which had a narrow screen where you could actually read and edit a whole line of text before it was permanently committed to ink and paper. To add to the fun, this high-tech machine made a satisfying low hum and moved in that stealthy-robot way that was so mesmerising to the youth of the 80's. There I perfected the art of the grammatically dubious but deeply entertaining run on sentence. I could write a page or two without a period, following the random and strangely interconnected storylines that spewed onto the keyboard from some dark but verdant corner in my unconscious mind. All creative process with little concern for conventional sense making. Perhaps this blog is an ode to those first versions of the blog of the absurd, and the characters, real and imagined, that inspired me to follow the stream of consciousness that seemed to access itself only when unfettered by the editors critical eye, or a delete key.
I must add here that this phenomena is often fed by the presence of another soul, someone who can perceive hilarity in the small strange things that make up our external world and add to it. So the Blog of the Absurd in some ways may become a recording of some of these synergistic textathons that only emerge when two equally deviant word-smiths get a hold of something. It is a place where all manner of things unfunny and mundane sprout wings. These conversations, are often exchanged over distances at opposite ends of the unquantifiable world of the interwebs, and can only evolve quickly. You just riff and respond, and must be willing to throw impulse control out the window. Having a tolerance for irreverence and an appreciation for the politically incorrect is required.
The secret is that I have another blog, a Blog of the Heart. It's where I lay down some depth and gristle, big life questions and ponderings, ruminations on how to be a better human. But there is a part of me that revels in the world of the riff-text. I think many things are funny and I love to launch into unbridled humorous rants with other folks who 'get' the weirdness of the world, and can come up with things like socialising your puppy with bearded t-rexes and selling frozen margaritas in dog toys.
So, I'm not sure what will follow this first post, because the core of the Blog of the Absurd is about following the most hilarious cottontail down the rabbit hole. It's not something that can be planned. And don't worry, I'll give you credit if you were involved in one of these riff-texting adventures.
