My friend Erin recently started a blog, but her posting has been pretty sporadic and today she’s reached that dark midnight of the blogger’s soul, the blogistential crisis if you will, that all of us online dabblers eventually come to:

I don’t have a cute kid to blog about, and my life is pretty uneventful so it’s not like I need an online forum to keep everyone abreast of my many comings-and-goings-about-town. And I definitely don’t need one more place in my life to rant about things that make me crazy.
So then I’m just left with commenting on things that strike me as unusual, or commenting on other people’s blog entries that I find entertaining. It becomes a spiral of commentary on someone else’s commentary on someone else’s commentary and, after a while, gets so diluted there’s no point to remembering the original commentary.
…
So this blog…well, I don’t know what to do about it.

She ends the entry by asking, among other things, “Why do you blog?” It’s a question I’ve asked myself many times, especially at those times when I’m not able to blog as much as I would like because of real-world obligations and I’m feeling all seized up inside from the frustration of having so much to say and no time (or no talent) to get it out in front of everybody. I’ve been to the place where Erin’s at now, been up to the edge and looked down, and I’ve thought more than once that I should just shut this thing down and find something better to do with my time. But I never do; I always find my way back to Simple Tricks. And I think, in my characteristically long-winded comment to Erin, that I maybe finally hit on what it is that keeps me (and hopefully my three loyal readers) coming back

…I’ve lately been thinking of the blog as a sort of conversation I’m having with the world, or at least the tiny portion of it that gives a damn about some insignificant nobody like me. …
When I blog, the audience I have in mind is my friends, and as such, I assume they do care about things like my pets or my hobbies or whatever. I imagine we’re in a diner somewhere just catching up and shooting the shit. And if it turns out that my readers really don’t care about the things I’m blathering on about, well, I don’t have to see their eyes glazing over on the other side of the table… 🙂

I like that image a lot. That’s really what we’re doing here, isn’t it? We’re just chatting over pie in the wee hours, preferably in one of those places with a sticky Formica counter that faces the kitchen window and the sweaty fry-cook, and we’re planted in brown-vinyl-covered stools beneath the light of those knobby, amber-glassed chandeliers that were old when Star Wars was still a recent movie. Thinking of it in those terms is really freeing, actually, because now I don’t feel so bad about not making every entry a long treatise filled with sparkling prose. Just as those late-night conversations meander like the smoke dribbling from the cigarette of the old guy next to you (hey, in my imagination, it’s still the years before all the “no smoking” laws, not because I smoke myself but because that’s how things were when I was regularly sitting up half the night talking philosophy and girls with my buddies), sometimes we’re talking here about something profound, the Big Issues of life, and then sometimes we’re just telling blond jokes. Because we’re just chatting over pie.

I hope Erin manages to find a conversation she wants to have. In the meantime, where’s that dang waitress with a warm-up for my cup?