'You Have to Think Like a Pilot.'

When I started this blog, my reasons were:
a) people told me to do it ('people' also told me I should get married, and we know how that went);
b) I figured it would be a good exercise in discipline (it wasn't);
c) it seemed like a better, more socially-sensitive outlet for my tirades than foisting long ranting emails about pepper grinders in the shape of roosters on people who just wanted to know if I wanted to get some dinner Thursday. (Success!)

And with some generous periods of silence, I've managed fairly frequently to write at least something. Which I think is good and proves I should be doing this or, minimally, that however crap whatever it is I'm going on about at any given time is, I have sufficient motivation to go on about it, and in this forum, rather than face-to-face, in a journal, through email, or by stealing a megaphone and standing outside yelling about poor taste in front of terrifyingly misconceived subdevelopments. So far so good; I think I am content with the 'Just because I'm not Goethe doesn't mean I shouldn't have a blog' stance.

But once it kind of evolved into having a voice/persona behind it - even if the focus or the voice itself changes at times, because we can say each little slant is part of the larger, overall slant - I kept thinking about all the goofy tags. Few serve any practical taggy purpose: nobody does searches for 'appalling taste' or 'Tuscan toilets,' and if they do, I don't think they want to end up here. Nor would a serious-minded searcher for Amelia Earhart trivia get very much rewarding stuff by clicking on her name in my tags. For what it's worth, I know which picture I have of her, but I have no idea why she's in here, what kind of a point I would have making to have had need of natty early-20th-c. aviatrices to support it, but I see her name every time I look at the blog, since she is up near the top of the tag list under A.

There are a couplefew problems. One is the disincentive of how much effort it would take to winnow down all the tags and to make new, sensible ones that might actually provide a clue as to what a posting is about. And it would be a very dull list. Another is that I like how the tags applied to a post better illustrate its content, just in a different way, than labeling it very precisely with what topics it literally contains. Then, too, I still find some of the goofy tags amusing to myself, and if this is really a blog, then that's my target audience: so as long as I keep chuckling nothing else should matter. I like having three entries obliquely or explicitly referencing 'bad monkeys' and another four mentioning Gauloises cigarettes, even if the postings are more substantively about interior design or telephones or pastry cream disasters.

And I imagine I could at least get rid of the ones that only link to one or two posts. 'Amelia Earhart' would be one of that group. But in many cases there is no reason to think I will only ever have one post that mentions that thing or person, so why take it out if I'm going to put it back in, I say. Still, I do think I could afford the time at some point to lose tags for types of wine and just have all fermented grape products under one 'wine' label, for example, without substantively compromising integrity. I could move all three 'fatuous boobs' and both 'idiocy' references to, perhaps, 'fatuity,' 'overarching incompetence,' or 'inanity,' depending on the content. But the thing is, when the posting is really a rant, or some ghastly stream-of-consciousness catalogue of aesthetic sins, and I go all over the place connecting things that in no way relate to each other except thematically and only to myself in some damp corner of my brain, I do go through the list of tags and often find one to append that I wouldn't have thought of had I not had such a long list. And today, I had to add 'China,' which I almost have many times but didn't because I had enough 'Chinese __________' tags. I didn't, on the other hand, make a new tag for 'Nestorians,' but I am sure I will have to at some point, and then it's going to end up between 'neo-Darwinism' (1 link) and 'neuroses' (likewise just the one) unless those have been excised by that point as having been insufficiently utile for all the nonexistent topic-shoppers reading my tag list hoping to find something truly worth reading.

You have to think like a cornichon.