Hermit Glitterati

OW!

You got gauntlet in my peanut butter!

There I was, enjoying an old man birthday, when blog-fool dropped a gauntlet. The silly thing hit my big toe, glopped in my peanut butter toe vat, then klunk-spatted into the street. That’s where all gauntlets go to die. The streets are littered with gauntlet droppings. The ants and crows pick clean the peanut butter though, so don’t bother…

Anyway… I can’t throw my cat without hitting one (The gauntlet—not the ants. I mean I have plenty of ants, but why would I throw my cat to miss them? A cat is a perfect ant-swatter if you fling it’s tail right. But I digress from the gauntlet gauntlet. Back to the gauntlet.). It’s like people find reasons to drop these gloves at the drop of their hat. I hope some haberdasher is profiting from this, cuz I’m not.

In the old days, they walked out in the street and dueled.

“I’m the fastest haberdasher in these here parts—no wait, blogger—now scribble!”

“Uh, you got me! Your verb usage was too quick. My prose flows purple with embellished blood!”

Now people just throw perfectly good hand wear. Yeah, whatever. I’m a blogger not a writer. Nobody wants to challenge me. Bloggers perch one link above toaster manual writers in the evolutionary chain.

“You know that line about ‘don’t use in the tub?’ I wrote that!”

Interesting side not for all you gauntlet holders out there, we’re one link below cereal box writers. Yeah, they get to join the nutty-cluster union. Bloggers are just a bunch of street vermin dodging gauntlets and flaming comments.

Who wants to compete with that? The Pirate Queen told me somebody at D360 did.

“You know somebody wrote a blog about you?”

“No, you’re probably just reading too much into it.” Cuz the last time I joked that somebody might have blogged about me, I got my eyes clawed out. Even bloggers need eyes, it’s brains and elbows that are dead weight to us. Toes? No, that’s where we keep our peanut butter, silly.

“Well they left a comment on your wall too.”

“Coincidence.”

“They said you were popular.”

“Oh, it’s ON!”

Me? Popular? Hardly. I’ve taken efforts to ensure my unpopularity. I sported horn-rimmed glasses until I was 12, and wore my uncle’s disco hand me downs 4 years after he graduated: 6 years after the great mirrorball piñata riot.

“Hey that’s glass, not candy!”

It was led by bloggers, before we found our idiom.

Popular?

I don’t send Christmas cards.

I kick my cat.

I hurl lawn gnomes at neighbor kids.

The good humor man? I shot him.

Popular?

Nope.

Why am I such a popu-phobe? I’m not. I just don’t believe in it. Popularity is a benchmark for people concerned with climbing up and falling down the social ladder. I have a social dungeon, not a ladder.

“Bring out the gimp.”

See? I’m too busy being Rob. And let me tell ya, being Rob isn’t easy. In school I was voted “most likely to hide in the library and scream ‘not in the face!’” Was that because my face was so beautiful? Well, duh! But that didn’t make me popular. It made me a target for every gang of pocket protector clad ruffians swinging slide rules like death scythes yearning to be popular. They were too busy playing D&D angry villagers to notice that I was not in the way of their popularity. It was the 20-sided dice and the slide rules.

“You get plus two throw to hit: he’s a blogger.”

Remember the kid in Almost Famous? That was me, except I wasn’t nearly as cute or intelligent: I had greasy hair and ate glue. I was 2 evolutionary rungs over the hairy butt boy at the circus. As an adult? Remember the kid in Almost Famous…? Now I AM the hairy butt boy at the circus.

“Come one come all! See the Rob stick to the Great Wall of Velcro! Careful boys and girls, keep your mitts to yourselves He flings poo! Oh, no worries, he’s stuck to the wall!”

I’ve never been popular. I don’t want to be popular. It takes too much effort. Four out of five dead-stars surveyed agree. Ask them. Go ahead, I’ll wait. What? They’re dead? See? That’s what popularity does to your relevance. Nobody cares what you have to say anymore.

I don’t care about relevance. I want to be Rob. I know, I know, it’s a little ignoble, but it’s who I am. This last weekend was my birthday. In the years since Neil Armstrong made a giant leap, Rob Boyd has tried to figure out what is under his kilt (mine, not Neil’s). It’s not mighty footprints on my moon; It’s a dude, a blog, and another day to smile (yeah, I keep peanut butter under my kilt too, wanna see?) I’m happy with that. My blog has nothing to do with being popular. It pings like a pinball of scattered thoughts. I’m lucky if it coherent.

If a Rob blogs in a vacuum does he make a sound?

He does when he passes out from lack of oxygen. But when you roll away his corpse, you’ll also find the blog he wrote. Maybe somebody will read it. Maybe somebody will crumple it up in a ball and toss it on my lawn: my legacy.

“Here lies Robert Boyd’s final wor—oh, wait, it’s now over there…”

Will the final words of a grumpy hermit yelling for kids to get off his lawn stand the test of time? I dunno. That’s for time to tell, but the one thing time won’t say is “Rob was popular.”

So I’ll continue to blog, and you can continue to stub my toe with the “popular” gauntlet if it makes you feel better, or you can just read and scratch your head. I guess that’s kinda what I’ve learned about Rob over these years. I write because I love it, and because it makes other people smile. If that makes me popular, then I wouldn’t know. I’m too busy working through psychoses, neuroses, phobias, foibles, and peanut butter.

I can tell my gauntlet wielding friend that if he wants popularity, he should go after that Caldwell guy. He’s got a front-page blog and hoards of hotties swooning. Me? I’m just a weak-link blogger and I’m happy that way.