You know when you´re sitting around having one of the late night drunken conversations, and you come up with an amazing idea for a blog, and it´s going to be t

he biggest thing to hit the interweb since Vernon Koekemoer, and  you wake up the next morning and you´ve forgotten your idea or, more likely, you remember it and realise it´s kak or, even if it still seems supercool, you can´t be arsed to actually do it?

That happens to me all the time as well. But after we discovered the definitive cure for male pattern baldness while larking around in the Golden Sands laboratory last night, I realised it would be cruel not to share our knowledge with the rest of the world.

There is enough hair out there that no one need suffer from baldness ever again – it´s just about distributing the hair we have more equitably. You may be Lady Lovely Locks, but we all know people who are, shall we say, follicly challenged. Just follow the lead of Sarah and Nick (pictured above) and you´ll be sorted.

Email your pics showing what you´re doing to combat hair loss to notabaldy@gmail.com. Together we will win the fight against baldness, one hairstylee at a time. Let´s share our hair, and spread the love!

I was chatting to my friend Rebecca this morning, when she uttered these immortal words:

“Blogs are like swine flu. The cool kids get it.”

Of course, having had it put in perspective so beautifully, there wasn’t really anything I could do other than abandon all protests, and start typing this post immediately. Which, in a last-ditch attempt to prove my point, is nonetheless a post about why I’ve never yet had a blog, and why I might never post on this one again.

The reasons in a nutshell:

1. Facebook is already too much damn hard work; in fact these days I feel almost obliged to spend as much time avoiding work as I do working, which means that technically speaking, if time is money, I should be earning double my salary, but the world doesn’t work like that, and I’m just too inert to make the whole business any more labour-intensive;
2. Whenever I think about starting a blog, I think about chucking back some gin and eating cereal out of the box while watching Kath and Kim reruns instead;
3. I am technologically impaired (severely). Example: my friend Anna forwarded me a mail today to say that a friend of hers is selling his Cooper S, and I read the specs with interest, stopping only to ask her why anyone would want a built-in seat warmer for his laptop*;
4. And here comes the real reason – despite being an avid reader of all my friends’ blogs, I think blogs in general are a bit…embarrassing.

There. It’s out.

Now, before we go any further, I should clarify that I have reason to read my friends’ blogs:

a) My friends are a decidedly B.A. crowd, which means they write extremely well; and

b) They are my friends and I love them, which means that even if they didn’t write well, which they do, they could vomit out 20 pages of drivel on why they favour 2-ply, and I’d still read it with interest.

But seriously. I really can’t for the life of me comprehend the level of narcissism that would drive all the average Joes out there to post daily on the real, mundane details of their lives, and expect (virtual) strangers to care. I have one distant acquaintance (conveniently nameless) who is horribly guilty of this, and not only feels the need to update his blog every time he decides to have tuna for lunch instead of egg mayo, but actually looks up the IP addresses of his friends-and-relations every day, and if he notices that one of them hasn’t been visiting his blog lately, writes them a personal email to ask why they haven’t been reading it. (Or, worse – that Facebook disease – to ask why they have not yet become his fan.)

Which brings us back to Rebecca’s original question of why I have never had a blog.

Because the sorry truth of it is this: like my acquaintance (who, unfortunately, hasn’t realised it yet) I am just not that interesting. If I were to post the real details of my life daily, my blog would look something like this:

Day 1:

Today I didn’t blog. Sorry

Day 2:

Go home

Day 3:

Seriously why are you reading this?

Day 4:

Ok you asked for it. Had bath

Day 5:

Gin

Day 6:

What?

Day 7:

Mmm. TV.

Day 8:

Day 8 already? Mmm. TV.

Day 9:

This TV thing is really catching on. Someone should advertise it.

Day 10:

Someone has already identified market potential of TV. Fuckit. Gin

Actually, all that stuff about digging TV is a lie, because in fact I don’t have a TV, so I only get the chance to dig TV when I periodically visit my parents and become too inert to leave for the next three months. Mind you, the stuff about not having a TV is a lie too, because to be precise I have two, but they are both unplugged until further notice, because I once, in a spasmodic fit of reform, scrubbed and rearranged my lounge; but in the shock of it all forgot how to plug the TV back in, and then I stopped to eat some cereal out of the box, and that was two years ago, and I didn’t really miss it, because like I said I have Kath and Kim and Buffy and Harry Potter on disc, and who needs anything else anyway.

And lastly, I haven’t had a blog because I have a very real fear that it will become a narcissistic addiction, and that I will, like so many before me, forget the social norms I grew up with, and begin to behave in a way that has for generations been cringeworthy in all mainstream circles but has – bizarrely – become the norm online lately, thanks to social networking sites. I am speaking, of course, of obsessive self-marketing, which to me is about as masturbatory – and Not Done – as taking photographs of yourself pouting in the shower and displaying them on the coffee table before your friends come round for tea.

Bottom line: I don’t think the influence of social networking sites should blind us to what we actually know, deep down, is antisocial behaviour. If we really want to write, shouldn’t we make like Real Authors and have the grace to let the experts, i.e. the editors of actual publications we submit to, decide whether our work is good enough to broadcast? Shouldn’t we keep our efforts professional, and shut up about it in public?

And if we are as presumptuous to self-publish, shouldn’t we just keep it on the down-low and leave the marketing at the door, the way we would at any normal social gathering? I mean, we’ve all had to ward off the dodgy Amway cousin banging on about his new pyramid scheme over Sunday lunch, and in an online context, how is blog-flogging to your friends any different?

I suppose a part of me just thinks: So you write. Bully for you. Now pass the potatoes.

—-

* A Cooper S is allegedly a car. Clearly not much has changed since I was in Grade 2, when a classmate told us in Show and Tell that her father had bought a Porsche, and I thought she meant a breed of brightly-coloured chicken.

Kief website of the day: www.taxijam.co.za

Here’s some blurb from the website itself (but go have a look as well)

—

Taxijam is the smallest gig around.

We provide a selection of some of South Africa’s finest creative talent performing in an intimate 5 minute taxi ride.

All clips are recorded and shot in exactly the same style, in one take and uploaded in their unedited format to our website.

Each and every performance is entirely democratic, there are no expensive stages or creative lighting, which makes it possible for viewers watch multiple musicians in exactly the same context.

We are not selective about what genre we shoot – We will shoot artists, musicians, poets, performers and basically anyone who blows us away….

This is a labour of love, and we will continue to shoot bands that we think are rad, but at the same time we like to link back to artists themselves, this is as much a showcase for them as it is for taxijam.

Whether you are famous or infamous, signed or unsigned, rock or pop, acoustic or metal or simply someone with a story to tell – anyone can hop on board…

Still holds true now as when it was first published five years ago…