Noisy Balloonist Blog is the apprentice

Pinging the divine in Torrance, CA.

Kumar has suggested I’ve launched a meme. As of this writing there are 4 gamer doodle nostalgia posts on Kotaku, but I suspect this is counting one’s chickens before they’ve hatched. Or posted. 2.0. Whatever: No meme this, no All Your Base or aforementioned frenetic mingling of peanuts and jam. A quasi-meme perhaps, a proto-meme even. But should yours truly, crusading luddite, be held responsible for birthing a mature, blue-blooded meme, the only remedy is a roundhouse kick to the face.

I am typically more self-effacing, but I was really tickled that Kotaku’s Eliza published my submission in its entirety. She’s even dubbed this burgeoning sub-genre of nerdom Kotaku Fridgu. As in, Momma Eliza will put your drawings on the Kotaku fridge. With magnets.

Let’s regress further with more selects from my 2nd grade journal, circa 1983-84. Go here to see images from the original post. Many of my entries were jokes:

What do you call a sleeping bull? A bulldozer.
What kind of house weighs the least? A lighthouse.
Knock, knock whos there, Arthur, Arthur who?”

My teacher enthused, “Arthur who? Tell me the rest!”

Arthur any moore cockies for you.

I was working a little blue. This entry is dated October 8, 1983:

Once upon a time I was walking in the Dark Lands and I saw He Man and Skelitor fighting. Then mur man came to fight to. But then Ram Man came to fight with He Man. then Cyclops came on the Panther. But then Man at arms came on the attack track and Skelitor was finished.

Pretty much every entry involves me walking somewhere once upon a time. This from December 14, 1983:

Once upon a time I was walking in the woods and I saw a Cougar fighting with a lion. Then the lion’s friend the Tiger ran behind the Couger and ate him up. The lion thanked the Tiger for helping him and they lived forever in paradise.

This entry, from April 1984, is a study in youthful boy-on-boy anti-climax:

One day my friend Jeff and I were walking in the forest and we saw a forest fire! I called the fire dept. and Jeff called the police dept. They came as fast as light. They gave the fire all the water they had! It didn’t work! While the firemen fought the fire Jeff called a police heliocopter full of sand. It flew over the fire and got some out, but not all. It seemed useless. Finally one of the firemen thought of something. He said if we all use all of our heliocopters and hoses we might, I reapeat, we might be able to get the Whole fire out! So, the cheif fireman called all the police heliocopters, firemen and firetrucks they had! So, Jeff and I went over to a road so we wouldn’t get hurt and watched go out. When it was all out we went back home and had a little fun.

Final entry, dated May 17, 1984:

From August 6 to August 27 my mom and I are going to Hawaii! We are going to do lots of fun things like: go to two Islands Maui & Oahu. We are also going to McDonalds, SeaLife Park, Castle Park. I know I’m going to love it. Good luck, Ben!

Mahalo from the Golden Arches. I don’t think we actually visited a McDonalds while on vacation, but—no joke—I vividly recall playing Burger Time in an arcade on Waikiki beach.

Huzzah! I’ve been published on Kotaku, that irrepressible chronicle of Sony bashing, moe, and Tingle fetishists, though not in the way you might expect. Turns out the brush was mightier than the pen.

I’ve been ill, of course, still combating all sorts of demonic physical manifestations, exhaustion, anxiety, and fear. All the while I’ve been taking stabs at a few imperious, essay-length blog posts, but this had proven very difficult so I dug through some of my old material—like really old—to see what might be worth recycling. I re-discovered my 2nd grade class journal and the imagery within. The rest is Kotaku history. Or was. Internet stardom is fleeting; my post was top-of-page for all of half an hour. Confound you, accelerated blogotime. I’ve seen transuranic heavy metals with longer half-lives than your average post. Oh snap, indeed.

Anyway, check out Ben’s Donkey Kong-Riddled Diary. Thanks to Eliza Gauger for publishing.

I’ll be cribbing a bit more from the journal before I’m done. Non-sequiturs from the mind of a 7-year old kid are absolute gold. Mrs. Abramowitz told me so.

I used to joke that millennia from now, when the alien archeologists visit the remnants of earth and pry the hard drive that will represent our civilization in the cosmic annals from the uranium-impregnated soilex, the only data they’ll recover (maybe they’re amateur alien archeologists) will be a mis-punctuated blog post lamenting a recent purchase of off-brand shampoo, as the preferred stuff was out. Eons of human achievement down the drain like so much Suave Moisturizing 2 in 1.

Blog. The professorial bone in me stamps its foot (picture it) and declares, I’ll have none of this fly-by-night etymology: artificially synthesized, accelerated, casual. You can’t willy-nilly Frankenstein words together in some TCP/IP Petri dish, the bone would cry. MySpace has made you drunk with power! It’s like Botoxing the dictionary. And this is to say nothing of vlog, splog, plog, sploid, florg, and bloid.

Every time someone suggested I start one, I demurred. But you can write and you can bitch, they said with some consternation. What the hell is wrong with you? Get over yourself and blog already. But the net’s so incestuously self-referential, just link upon link upon link ceaselessly linking back to itself ad nauseam. No thank you, I replied. I’d feel like I was shouting down a well.

Welcome to Noisy Balloonist. It’s my blog. I swore I would never indulge.

One day it occurred to me that a blog would be a great platform from which to spew all manner of furious revolutionary invective. I dreamt of being the diamond to Daily Kos‘ hopper of soot. . . . Yer . . . I apologize. While the liberal chattering classes do not want for idiots, Daily Kos is alright, and I’m no diamond. Recent life events have taught me the value of tempering anger (and cutting remarks like the one above) with joy. You will find leftist rants on Noisy Balloonist, but you’ll find laughter, art, and observation in greater measure.

So I hope you enjoy my new bloid. Maybe you should grab the RSS feed so you’ll know when there’s something new; I’m dreadfully lazy. By the way, the other day they were out of Crest so I picked up a tube of Tom’s of Maine. You should really consider making the switch.