I guess this is a post about posting. Which I guess is a lot like those cheesy speeches about speeches that we had in elementary, but I don’t easily recall ever writing one of these, so I’m using up my quota of one, right here. (Plus, I never had a speech about speeches in elementary school – I had a speech about the future, which earned top votes to represent our class in the school speech competition, but Mr. Sasaki called an audible and vetoed it. Which – in hindsight – was the only sensible choice. It was a terrible, terrible speech. But Grade 8 never happened, so I don’t even know what I’m talking about.)

You ever feel like you’re in a slump? Like every pitch you hit is lined right to someone, or shots that you normally hit are rattling out of the rim or ringing off goal posts? Kinda feels like that right now. My head’s not right, and I just can’t sit down and hammer a post out, even a half-assed “It’s not a tumah!” post. And I realize we’re not exactly some hot corner of the web that has a million viewers frantically hammering on F5 every second desperate for updates, so this is obviously more of a personal luleerah trip than an apology to our “readers.” I’ve gone much longer without a post before, but after 5 days, this particular slump is starting to feel like a personal failure. There’s been plenty of slumps before – I mean, 99% of the content on this website is half-assed and there’s countless posts that have no actual content – just posted for the sake of posting. But the desire to post has always been there. Not now though. This is new.

I aim for about two days between posts (though it’s generally a target I never hit). Not because I feel obligated to provide content and frequent updates, but because I like this gig, and I find it incredibly difficult to stop and start again after large chunks of time off. I can’t just type up a high quality post, stop for a week and then come back with another one – I have to continually hammer away with small, low quality hits on a consistent basis. I have to keep the rhythm going or else it eventually tails off and the motivation dies completely. Story of my life, actually. You see, I subscribe to the “slippery slope” theory of life because it seems to be such an accurate representation for me. The way you live your life is built on top of a foundation of standards and moral ethics that are weighed against the perpetual compromises that you must inevitably make throughout life. So everything in life is like a slippery slope – the more compromises you make, the farther down the slope you go, and the harder it is to get back up. And it applies to every standard or habit you have in life. When you skip class for the first time, you’re just missing one class. No big deal. But then it gets easier and easier to skip the next time and the time after that, because you’ve established precedence and you’re already halfway down the slope, and it’s easier to keep sliding down than it is to climb back up.

And I’ve found that this is especially true for me. I am so pathetically weak-willed that once I start going down a slope – any slope at all – I’m going all the way down. It gets harder and hard for me to start again once I’ve stopped for any significant period of time. At this point, I’m farther down the “don’t really feel like posting” slope than I’ve ever been, and this is my last desperate grab at an outcropping tree branch to slow my fall. I mean…goddamn, it’s fucking slippery!

Everything starts with something small. Every bad habit or personal failure in your life could probably be traced back to a single long forgotten compromise you made way back. And that’s a scary thought, to know that you alone are ultimately responsible for all your shortcomings, that everything has precedence, and the corners you cut today could come back to haunt you tomorrow? …unless you were in like…a plane crash or something. I mean, that’s difficult to guard against. I don’t really think there’s a plane crash slope. Unless you’ve been getting into accidents with progressively more complex vehicles – like first with skates, then with a skateboard, then a tricycle, then a bike, then a car, then an 18-wheeler, then a Sessna or something…I mean in that case, it’s really your own damn fault for getting into a commercial jet liner after all that.

Why do you think I have to kill drifters to get an erection now?

There’s a balance to it though. It’s almost a perfectly linear relationship between the quality and the quantity of your posts. I mean, I can’t update everyday or else I’ll be forced to scrounge up content from my daily life all the time, and nobody wants that. But you wait too long, and sometimes your self-imposed slump gets too big for you to overcome – you’re too far down the slope, and eventually you just decide “Ah screw it.” and the whole thing dies. And now that we’re heading into four (4, IV, FOUR!!!!) years, there’s almost a reverse slope theory going on here – we’ve descended far too deep into a reality where The WAMBAG exists – there’s really no choice but to continue.

Which is why the only way this would have worked was as a group blog. Only one guy needs to post each time. In theory, it isn’t so bad to aim for a bi-daily update schedule with a team of five. Theoretically, you only need to post once every ten days. Logically, it all works out. There’s really no way it can fail.

Of course, everything really goes out the window when you realize that there is absolutely no purpose behind this website. There’s far too many inside and irrelevant bits for this page to have any entertainment value to anyone other than the guy posting, the links are too far and few between for us to fit into that category, and even the personal stuff is too lacking for this to be a standard blog. I don’t get paid, I don’t really want anyone I know to read this page, and whenever I try to come up with a reason I’ve been hitting that “Publish” button for so long, I come up confused and a little depressed. So why bother to think about it? This is what it is. I don’t know what that is, but this is IT.

Generally, I find it’s pretty easy to break out of a slump. All you need is a sucky YouTube link, a racist joke, a random Will Ferrell or Van Damme quote recalled from memory, and that’s a solid three paragraph post right there. I’ve actually wrote up pre-written-break-glass-in-case-of-posting-slump-emergency-posts like that in the past. I’ve just used them all up right now. But there was just something about this slump – I couldn’t just break out by running out an infield single. I had to type up thirteen hundred words. I don’t know why.

But now it’s out of the way, and hopefully, it’s back to business as usual.

You can look the other way once, and it’s no big deal, except it makes it easier for you to compromise the next time, and pretty soon that’s all you’re doing – compromising – because that’s the way you think things are done. You know those guys I busted? You think they were the bad guys? Because they weren’t – they weren’t bad guys – they were just like you and me.

Except they compromised…once.