The Atheist Jesus Poetry Contest is over...and the winner is:
If Cass Brown, known as Atheist Jesus
Were to die for our blog, that would please us.
If it won't cleanse our sins,
Or bring peace at our ends,
We'd give thanks for the page view increases.
* * *
That Cass Brown, known as Atheist Jesus,
Has cancer does not really please us.
But if godless he passes,
From this world full of asses,
Then his chance for real peace just increases.
In case you missed the original post, Cass Brown is an atheist, and he is dying of cancer. In conjunction with The Raving Atheist, Cass decided to become the first Atheist Jesus and die for someone's blog.
I greatly admire Cass for the way he is handling his illness.
"OK so you can handle what is happening to your body. It ain't doing what it should and it's not looking like a picnic from hereon in. So you feel sorry for your situation, you regret your wasted life and you sink into a depression. Don't you dare, you selfish bastard! The only people who deserve pity are those poor souls who will take care of you and watch helplessly as you eventually begin to slide."
-Cass Brown
Cass wrote to thank me for featuring his blog on boing boing. He's received so much traffic and good wishes from readers that it has turned him into a blogging junkie. I ask that everyone stop by and wish him well. You can read his thoughts on the winner here.
Oh yeah, and congrats to Three Dog Blog. Cass Brown is dying for your blog.
Read the rest of the entries on The Raving Atheist blog.
posted by Alan Graham at 9:15:40 AM | permalink
In putting together the blog book, I realized that outside of photo blogs, there were several specific types of blog entries.
Informative: short, sweet, linked. Makes a quick point and backs it up with a link to another site. Boing Boing has made this into an art form.
Blisdom (blog wisdom): can be short or long, relies on a narrative to make a subtle point. Often pulled from a life experience. Here's an example from a conversation with my wife:
Wife: I just had the strangest dream. I was on a train...
Me: Coach or First Class?
Wife: Honey, I don't dream in coach.
Vanity Post: Often inane. Represents everything that journalists like to point to and say, "See, blogs are worthless."
‘While the unexamined life may not be worth living the overexamined life is not worth reading.’
--Scott Simon of NPR on “inane weblogs”
That doesn't mean these blog entries aren't interesting when read as part of the whole blog...it just means that if there is a point, it is often missed by the casual visitor, like going from Sopranos series 1 to series 4.
Fiction: There is a lot of emerging fiction popping up from blogs. Harder to find, but worth the journey.
Then comes the post that has had the biggest affect on my life. I don't have a clever name for it, so let's just call it the "shoes" post...as in walk a mile in another's shoes. Sometimes it has a clear point, and other times it just resonates inside you. Whatever the author's point behind the post, it takes on new meaning in your own mind. Sometimes you learn something about someone else, but often you learn something about yourself.
Here's a few examples of these types of posts:
My Waking Nightmare by Adam Hindman." Be sure to explore the rest of the site. Some brilliant short fiction here as well.
So, Are You Japanese, or Korean? by Alice Matsumoto. A good example of how the desire to identify with another culture often makes you look like an idiot. Like my uncontrollable need to play hip-hop around my African American friends, so I am seen as cool...even though it is quite pathetic and probably transparent (now I play Def Leppard...ultra white, but has the word "def" in it).
Then we have Stand. A Korean-American man who, at separate points, has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and manic depression. He has been institutionalized 5 times through the two main "episodes" of madness, the first having lasted from July 1991 through about April 1997.
A sample:
"There is nothing to be done about this, I think. It stays hidden from view, as it only comes when no one else is around. It is not distressing, really -- the phenomenon has been with me so long I have put it down as old hat, par for the course. Looking at me, you would never know that I routinely talk to angels in my spare time."
and
"You cannot say, I don't think, that in this moment, I was sane, and in the next moment, I was insane. Many borders in this life are fuzzy, hazy. You cannot say one thing ends here and another begins. Or maybe there are parts to it: on this day, just my foot was insane, but not the rest of me. Something like that. Or maybe it was that "snap", after all. Maybe it's when you're so far gone you can't talk your way out of it. Maybe only when they're sure you're gone, you're gone. Before that, you're just weird or eccentric or even "interesting". No one wants to believe it, least of all you. You joke about it all the time, but man, when it's serious — keep away from that. So, when was it, exactly? I dunno. I think it was when nobody was laughing anymore."
This site makes me wonder if perhaps Neil Gaiman's brilliance is rooted in madness.
posted by Alan Graham at 8:19:26 AM | permalink
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