ROW80 DAY 18 - MANY MOODS OF MARY

I was planning on waxing ecstatic about my new group of victims, er,  friends, that I have joined. Triberr! Yes, I am in a very prestigious tribe, with Head Chief of none other than Andi-roo herself, along with my swell Bonfire mates, Amberr Meadows, DadBlunders, Lottie Nevin and last, but definitely not least, the estimable, Jesse Libecap or "Hubz". In honor of this fine occasion, I hereby  dub Andi-roo "Grand Duchess of Dialog." Well, at least until I think up something less hokey. Anyway, after I admired my new Tribe and read all the cute little comments, I checked in on my own blog. Actually, I read my email.

Disaster! Well, kind of. Or, actually some of my Mary Confuse-a-(fill in the blank) struck a hapless reader. A very kind lady and a fine writer was confused by my timeline or description, or perhaps my life, and for that I apoligize, Michelle G. I kind of picked on all of my readers a few posts ago, indicating that I don't get much feedback from you, so I'm not sure what you all are reading or not reading. If this were in the daily paper, I could inveigh heavily on how this was mighty fine toilet paper, or bird-cage liner, but the culture has changed; we all know that. In my post-analytical, pray to the God of logic and sense, I am at last comfortable with the fact that I sow confusion at least as much as I am confused and am unbothered by it. Some people are bothered by it though and still appreciate some rational behavior. However, most of my readers are familiar with my rather free-wheeling approach after everything went to hell. I have a decent rein on my circumstances; my bills are paid, I have a roof over my head and I'm pretty healthy. Just about all my readers know why I blog now and why I'm no longer in the concert halls or working for IBM or Verizon anymore. Let me recap, quickly.

I became homeless after a lengthy hospitalization. I'm not anymore, but live across the street and over one block. I see lots of the same people. I'm glad that I am here. I can write about these folks and maybe be of some help to them.

This is one of those days when I just can't scrape up the enthusiasm, to be cheerful, insightful and breathtakingly witty. I know it's temporary, but everything seems so bleak. I hate being blind, it fucking sucks. I run into walls, doors. I jump because something the size of a mouse seems the size a car and cars are the size of mice; it's always DefCon5 in my head. I hate having to plan my goddamned day around the St. Vitus' Dance thing. I wonder how long it will be before I have to get rid of things I can't button. How long will it be before someone has to feed me? I haven't been able to drive for several years. I have trouble cooking now and pretty much don't now. I blame it on the heat. This is the down side to the bipolar thing. I'll take the up thing. I'd rather stay up for a month and forget August. I can wake up in September in the hospital again and call it a month.

Jesus, I'm sorry. I have no one to talk to, really. I love JC beyond measure, but we are worlds apart in so many things. He has no concept what I've been through and where I'm going. The only reason I pour this out to you, is because I have been caught at a low point in this instant. And why? Who knows? I don’t feel ill, I don't believe there are any celectial bodies in some kind Szyzygy thing, I took my meds. It's just that every so often... I don't feel right. I don't think we're meant to walk around in some kind of happy haze and I'm not that type anyway. I usually walk around in a froth of righteous anger, ready to punch out the lights of any Simon Legree who dares to cross paths with me. I will hurt you in a heart beat if you take on the weak, defenseless, young, halt, lame and I have.

Well, that must have been just a melancholy instant. I feel better now. Ready to see what is going on out in the world. Ready to figure out this Triberr thing. I think I'm going to be the Critic/Cheerleader of the outfit. I can't write fiction. It's like when I was in music school. We had to actually compose music. I can play music, just don't ever, ever ask me to write the stuff. If something diabolical happened and every piece of sheet music ever written disappeared and everyone who ever remembered a piece of music or played by ear forgot how to do that, it would be unanimous. "Mary is not allowed to put pen to paper."

When I was in Music Composition II in college and struggling, my professor said, "here's a fool-proof method," whereupon he had me map out a bunch of triads, tonic, subdominant, dominant, tonic, something simple. Then he had me circle one of the notes in each triad and draw a line from each note, a musical sort of connect-the-dots, "fool-proof," if you will. I did as he instructed. He played what I had written. He sat there, at the piano for a minute. He said, "God, that's horrible." So, Mary doesn't write music. And Mary will not be writing fiction.

ROW 80 DAY 15 FORM DOESN'T ALWAYS FUNCTION

After the rigors of the last several days, it seems as if I've been all too serious, or at least that is the overall, vague impression I have if I reminisce for a few seconds, deep thinker that I am. So, I figure it's high time for some good old fashioned slap-stick, with my patented confusion as usual imprimatur stamped on this here post. This is going to be one patched together mess of a post. Be warned. I seem to be doing that more often lately. Warning, I mean. I hope I am not developing sloppy habits. Yeah, snort. As if I ever had any other sorts of habits.

Anyway, I've been gradually developing some kind of reader base. Of what, and how many I am not certain, but enough folks on Twitter and my dear Facebook family are reading this blog and responding, sort of. So, I owe it to you, my dear readers to "change it up" once in a while. Balls. I am using you all as my guinea pigs; I am not earning a farthing and I bounce my half-baked ideas off your patient craniums. We have an "understanding," you and I. I blather endlessly and you all play clams. So, now that we all know where we stand, let's move ahead.

One of the things that I have discovered in my new life as a blogger, is that you have to have readers. Wow, what a shock! No, you have to track your readership and you have to try and figure out what they want to read and tailor your writing to them or tailor your readers to your writing or some shit. I don't know. It sounds like running for president to me. If you have to tailor your writing to your readership, everybody gets short shrift. The readers know you're a phony and you aren't going to be happy writing horse dukey.

So, to help us achieve this ephemeral goal of keeping track of our readers, we have an ever-changing batch of tools and by "ever-changing" I mean just that. I see ads for Hoot Suite, Google Metrics, Blogger, WordPress and I know I'm probably wrong about most of this stuff. There's RSS something or other, Reddit, which has a Spaceman. Today, I got the email about Triberr going Atomic. Triberr is an application where you connect with, or recruit, bloggers who share your interests and blog like you do, or something. At first, I kind of thought, "well, isn't this like Coke recruiting Pepsi?" but then; you know how you think you've seen and done it all and you're jaded to the world? Well, this experience has shown me that the complete opposite holds true. So I took a flyer. I went to sign up for Triberr. Maybe I could get in a Tribe or something, with bloggers who are kind of like me (yeah, that's happening.)

Anyway, I register and look around this website. Oh goody. I'm in a tribe and I have 100 bones! A tribe of one! What's a bone? Yup. This is the way to get myself out there and join up with others of my kind. So, because I never read anything instructional anyway, (seriously, I never opened a computer textbook) I proceed to poke around on the interface. I wind up at "Bonfires" which looks suspiciously like the old "Lonely Hearts" section in the printed Want Ads of the newspaper, with snappy messages and coy photographs attached. After I blundered around in here for a while and decided that, no, I did not want Techno-Geeky 12 year olds bloggy-blogging their way to fame and fortune with me riding uneasily on their shoulders while I wore a Princess Leia harem outfit. I hope and pray that this is only in the fevered imaginations of their cyber-minds. After what seemed like 40 pages of this, I decided I wasn't going to find "my peoples" going about it this way, so I backed out of Bonfire of the Inanities and went back to the home page. I studied the Tribe menu for a minute and chose some categories:

  

Oh my. I think I broke an algorithm.

After that little eye-opener, I decided to find my kind of writers the old-fashioned way. I'd backtrack to them. I rooted around until I found these guys: TheAnonBloggers. They're pretty anarchic and fun. They don't seem to take anything too seriously and they write a variety of stuff. Okay, that part of it fits, so I can hang with them for the fun parts.