You Too Can Be A Blogger

The only book that has permanent territory on my coffee table is called 100 Bullshit Jobs...And How to Get Them, by Stanley Bing. As a public service, and during this harsh unemployment, I am going to reproduce Mr. Bing's section on the number 13 BS job: Blogger. Fortunately 'lawyer' is also on the list of bullshit jobs, and I therefore have no fear of being sued for copyright infringement. Away we go.

Blogger

$$: Relatively small, but prospects for high-paying bullshit job in the future are virtually assured.

Bullshit Quotient: 92. Sometimes you piss off the wrong people.

(The maximum number is 200, and the only job in the book achieving this level is 'Being Donald Trump'.)

Skills Required: Ability to upload thoughts, vapors, resentments, insights, lack of insights, rumors, stuff you've heard, stuff you haven't heard, truth, lies, semifact, appropriated wisdom, logrolling, political and sociological venom, self-promotion, and other cultural effluvia on a blank screen day in and day out; must possess the impression that one's quotidian brain activity is of interest to others. Helps to be funny but when that is impossible, being hateful often suffices.

Duties: Write all day. Write all night. doo-dah.

Famous Examples: Wonkette. All the blogs owned by Murdochian online minimogul Nick Denton--Defamer in LA, Gawker in New York--tend to be the creme de la creme of the genre, with vast knowledge of who is attractive and vulnerable to abuse. Others, like Matt Drudge and Jim Romanesko, are not bloggers per se but packagers of other people's digital fart and, at times, actual journalism.

How to Get It: Set up a Web log by establishing a site. That is your blank slate. Don't leave it blank for long. Start writing, and by writing, I mean filling up the screen with words. Try to do this all the time. Let no notion or twinge go unexplored. After a while, your natural human tendency to be appropriate or kind or thoughtful or to edit yourself in any way will decay, falling away from you like a dead husk. This is good. When it's gone altogether, you'll find your output will be staggering. It's not that hard to write when the activity itself is the only job requirement.

The Upside: The is one of the bullshit jobs you can do immediately, with no training and no prior experience. You can also become very famous, since the established media, increasingly devoid of excitement and ideas of its own, has taken to siphoning off daily blogging activity as a much better and more interesting alternative to actual news.

The Downside: You need a full, daily dose of imagination, guile, bile, and people pouring nonsense into your head that you can repeat.

The Dark Side: Your skin glows an ethereal white, your eyes become rheumy and bloodshot. Hair erupts in horrendous places. You don't care. You are now nothing but a conduit through which pass all the rare gases of the universe. You are, in short, a blog.