Top 10 Bleakest Unpublished Blog Posts of 2009
By Tao Lin
3. “Offensively Bleak” (January 29)
Seems like “idle ranting” designed to console myself by vaguely articulating various aspects of bleakness in order to decrease my expectations in a tonally amenable manner. Seems like I can currently relate to this blog post.
Just read the last 3 paragraphs and it seems like I wasn’t blogging, I was actually asking questions for people to answer, with the intention of it becoming a meme. Seems like as some kind of joke, or something, I specified that people answer only about my blog, not their own blogs. Seems like this blog post wanted to involve other people in its bleakness by utilizing a Livejournal-esque interactive-meme. Seems…bleak.
Seems bleak. Seems like I tagged “gawker, hipster runoff, michelle williams, tom hanks super fan, ron silliman, chris killen.” I don’t remember any of them participating. I think I unposted this after ~2-30 hours.
without this blog what am i (a meme)
am i anything without this blog
am i more or less ’rounded’ as a character without the internet
do my books mean anything, do they do anything
am i going to be okay or am i going to kill myself
why do i feel that nothing is concrete, why is everything an abstraction to me if i haven’t had coffee in the last two hours
does this blog’s existence cause me to eat more or less carbohydrates
what percentage of my diet is organic, is it really 90-95%
do manatees distinguish between the world of phenomena and the metaphysical world, is a dog or hamster just an abstraction to another dog or hamster
do hamsters believe there is good or bad in art
do i view the world in terms of a one-dimensional spectrum where one end-point is labeled ‘funny’
do i still have feelings if i believe i am an abstraction
am i still severely depressed if i keep thinking ‘haha’
what will happen when don delillo dies
does a major catastrophe exist that would cause me to blog about it on this blog
has anyone ever thought ‘i honestly want an asteroid to fall on me and destroy me right now’ and then gotten hit by an asteroid, has anyone even ever been hit by an asteroid that killed them, does that even happen or should i stop wanting that
for how much longer can the tone of this blog be sustained
is this blog sustainable, can this blog die, like can hits go down to zero
hits are increasing, but why do i feel sad
are hits not the answer to happiness, i feel confused, how many hits are required, what numbers are acceptable to tao lin, are his neurotransmitters going to do something or something or just not do anything or something
do i both mean and not mean everything i say on this blog
is there a new tone being created or did people write books like this in 1200 and 1500 and they just didn’t gain a large enough readership or be taught by knights and priests and so went very out-of-print and do not exist anymore
how many units has this blog contributed to moving, is this blog a financial success
do people believe that this blog is moral within a moral worldview, not moral within an existential worldview, is there philosophical confusion within this blog’s readership
is my worldview not contained within each sentence that i publish on the internet
should i use more adverbs
should i disown several of my books, i can delete them from my wikipedia page and they won’t exist as much anymore, should i edit my oeuvre as i edit everything else i effect on the universe
how many friends have i made due to this blog
will this blog ever have a period of exponential growth
where did the tone of this blog come from
do people that i would like dislike this blog, have i created an internet persona that alienates a number of people that i could, like, hang out with and not feel bad
copy and paste the above questions into a ‘new post’ in your blogger account then type your answers to those questions and tag five to ten other people, pressuring them to also answer the questions on their own blogs, at the bottom of this post i will maybe link every blog that participates in this meme
*disclaimer* questions are specific to ‘reader of depressing books’ not any other blog *disclaimer*
i tag: gawker, hipster runoff, michelle williams, tom hanks super fan, ron silliman, chris killen