Metaphor had a visitor today from Jalisco, Mexico, according to sitemeter.

Very cool. I don’t often get folks stopping by in other countries. (Did that syntax work at all?) Western Europe, a few times, but it’s rare.

Bienvenidos, amigos!

If you’re a regular, you may have noticed a few changes to Metaphor. Over the past couple of days, I tried out some different color schemes, and I think I’ve settled on one, for now, that’s readable. Blogger (Google) really needs to offer a wider variety of theme templates. One can download many templates online, but a downloaded template has to be installed, which I imagine to be a pain in the ear.

There are new content links in the right column. What I’ve done there is to link up to my own writing work product here in the blog and on my primary Web site. This should make it easier to find things like my poems, without having to search or rummage through topic labels.

I am hoping to find the fortitude to turn the focus of the blog more toward my own interests and less toward banalities posted just to entertain you. I mean, stuff I had no part in creating. The whole Internet exists largely for your entertainment, and presumably you come here to find out what’s on my mind. Seriously, I’ve asked for your attention, and I ought to give you something for it. And you get enough pictures of cute pets with funny captions, right?

As always, please leave comments. I know I’m whistling in the wind with this request, but I’m sincere. If you don’t leave a comment, I can’t know if you appreciate the fact that this blog exists, or my writing either.

If you don’t care for commenting in public, that’s cool. Click here and send me a note. … Thanks.

Bloggers generally like it when people leave comments. It’s called external validation, and it’s not necessarily a good thing. Here’s a snippet of psychology textbook effluent to give you a general idea.

… self-esteem is how you regard yourself (or how you appear to regard yourself) regardless of how this view was cultivated. … Psychologists believe that a “self esteem” that depends on external validation of the self (or other people’s approval) … external validation [is] “pseudo self-esteem” … “true self-esteem” comes from internal sources, such as self-responsibility, self-sufficiency and the knowledge of one’s own competence and capability to deal with obstacles and adversity, regardless of what other people think.

Right. So here’s how you leave a comment on the blog, so I know what other people think.

1. Click the link that says 0 Comments at the end of the post. If it says something besides zero, someone has already left a comment. Click it anyway. This just means we’ve all tumbled down a rabbit hole.
2. Type your comment in the field that appears. Be as brief or effusive as you like, I suppose.
3. When you’ve finished, select one of the identity options. If you don’t have an ID like those listed, just choose Name/URL. You can type in your first name only, and leave URL blank if you don’t have a Web site you want to link to. 
4. Click Publish Your Comment.
5. Go have a cup of coffee, and pretend I bought it for you to show my appreciation.

Finally, look at the first image above again. See the little white envelope next to “0 Comments?” If you click that envelope, you can easily e-mail the blog post to a friend, or someone you believe is in need of punishment for some reason. It’s cool to do that.

Goodness me. Visits to my little blog have dropped from an average of 11 a day to 2.

Whew.

This does not bode well. It portends bleakly, I think.

Time to rethink. Do I have another think coming?

I love the idioms of American speech, especially Western and Southern people. Well, that’s what I know. I try to give my characters every chance to speak as I’ve heard the real people in my life. Especially my grandparents.

There’s a story about my uncle, who worked for a while in the late 1960s in the oil exploration near Jeaneu AK. When he decided to quit, he went and told the foreman he was draggin up. Then he went to wait for the helicopter to take him to town. It came, and the pilot said he’d made his last flight for the day. My uncle replied that he had drug up. The pilot said too bad, next flight tomorrow. My uncle said that was OK. Instead of taking him to town, the pilot could just take an ass-kickin where he stood. So they took off and flew to town.

Good stuff, Maynard.

I’m draggin’ up means I’m gathering my possibles (belongings, tools, etc.), I’m packin my grip, and I’m leaving.

Line from an old song, title lost in memory but stored somewhere on the iPod:

Don’t give me no lip or I’ll pack my grip.

Isn’t that great? A grip, of course, being a small bag or suitcase; a smallish container for clothing, usually with a handle and a clasp or buckle strap.

It’s pretty rare for me to get away with using my favorite idiomatic speech in conversation. The only person who really gets it is my Dad. Which makes sense, because I learned most of it from him.

Once in the office, as some of us were draggin up for the day, I said, I feel like I’ve been rode hard and put away wet. This is an old cowboy expression. It’s not good to ride your horse hard and put it away without drying and brushing; your horse can get sick. But one of the women thought it had something to do with human sex, and took offense, and I had to apologize. Idiot lacks idioms. Your mother tongue has nothing to do with getting kissed by your mama.

I feel like I been drug through a knothole, et by a bobcat and shat off a cliff.

It has been a week since I posted anything to the old blog. Sorry about that, though no one has actually complained. I know how it is to keep checking a site for new content and finding bupkis. I got a little a annoyed with The Guardian recently, when they took a week’s break from their Writers’ Rooms series , without so much as a by your leave. Grrumble.

I’ve had a cold. Been thick as a dawg, don’t ya know. That’s my excuse. My ears are still stopped up, got a bit of croopiness in the bronchi, and the attic is still … flooded, I suppose. And wouldn’t it be great to hear Obama come out in purposeful support of a cure for the common cold? He can raise my taxes for that.

I’m thinking of moving the blog.
Been pondering it for a long time, actually. I keep waiting and hoping that Google will give us a writing interface that isn’t the Internet’s equivalent of a small box of Crayola Crayons. It makes me a little crazy, trying to express myself in a box the size of an index card on my monitor. You can’t see very much of your post at a time. Sure, I don’t have to type the post in the box. I’m typing this one in Google Docs. But when you paste it over, often you have to reformat paragraph breaks, links, etc. And you have to add images and embedded files from scratch.

Sometimes when I open Blogger and try to type something literary or meaningful to me, it feels like I ought to follow the exercise with milk and cookies and a nice nap.

So my idea is to move Metaphor from kylekimberlin.blogspot.com to kimberlin.wordpress.com . It’s an address I’ve had for a long time, and I’ve been running a kind of mirror copy of this blog there, so there’s much of the same content there already. WordPress has a full size text editor, plus static pages to add more content. It’s a little harder to use, but what the hell.

If I did move, I would miss some things about Blogger, like the Send To Blogger tool in Google Toolbar. And the fact that Blogger is so easy and user friendly. But if Google is never going to spend a few bucks to upgrade the kindergarten text editor, then I’ve already waited too long.

I would love to know what my readers think about the idea. Please click here to check out the WordPress blog , then click the link to Go Back in the right column, to come back here and leve a comment. Or use the e-mail link on either blog to send me a personal message.

Speaking of Comments
I’ve had to tighten up the comments function on this blog so that comments are now moderated. This is because I got some spam comments on my last post. I therefore renew my call for the world’s powers to leave the extremist failed states to destroy themselves through canibalistic suicide and gross isolationism, and apply all necessary resources to hunting and killing spammers and virus writers. The planet’s true thugs.

I have a bone to pick with bloggers. Bearing in mind that I don’t know everything, I ask you, is this good communication?

Today I finally arrived here in order to attend this.

You’ll have to do some reading and thinking to discover that that doesn’t happen there, and that neither that or there was likely to interest you in the least.

It’s amazing how often I see it: a blog post whose whole function is to say ooh go look at this shit.

A link in a blog post should be an invitation to get more or different information, not a misdirection and a delay in place of any writing at all.

Here’s another example:

Oh holy crud, this just makes me sick.

What am I gonna go look at? Can I have a hint before I click?

Let us bear in mind, fellow citizens, that the purpose of blogging is communication. It’s not communication if I have no idea what I’m reading about until I go read something else.

Just my humble opinion! And I know I’ve done it too, and that I have a bad habit of fertilizing my own blogs with quotes. I offer a gentle constructive criticism. So please don’t get all you know.

I’ve added a new blog to the blogroll. It just popped up on WordPress, and it’s off to a slow but interesting start, with a couple of great YouTubes I hadn’t seen. It’s called Squelch.

So good luck to him, or her. Whatever a Squelch is.

Well I tried the dualistic, yin-yang, mind-matter, no matter never mind, horns of the bull thing of writing two blogs for a while. I gave it a good run and I don’t like it.

I don’t like having two blogs, Sam-I-Am.

It’s been a metaphorical thorn in my paw for weeks, and for weeks I’ve pondered and puzzled and damn near struggled to decide which one to keep at home, and which one to drive way out in the woods and leave behind. The latter wound up being poor Peaceable.

I’ll miss it. The blog had some good content, I think, and an earnest message. So I’m not happy, not enriched or following my bliss. But maybe a little (en)lightened. If, as the Buddha said, enlightenment is no suffering, then I’ve got that going for me. Which is nice. Personally, I prefer philosophy that avoids negative definition, but that’s me. Maybe this works: So it goes. Everything is on it’s way somewhere else.

Holy crap, Kyle, why are you making such a big deal of this triviality that effects no one including, perhaps especially, yourself?

I don’t know, I’m just typing. Gimme a break. You got maybe something more important to read?

Please make sure to subscribe to metaphor. In the right column, toward the bottom, you’ll see a bunch of little buttons, under the heading Subscribe to Metaphor. If you use one of those sites, you can sub to this blog with them.

A house divided against itself cannot stand.

A bit of advice for the neophyte blogger out there. If you’re going to do a blog with a theme or focus, pick what you love and stick with it. But have just one blog. Or suffer the consequences.