Something needs to change

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(When reading through this post, bear in mind that I may have written several categorical claims. Please note that I am not including ALL of a certain demographic, just most.)

I was looking at my blog the other day, just browsing, and I started to ask myself: if my blog were placed in the middle of several blogs, would it stand out?

The answer was no.

So, I'm starting to wonder to myself, what can I do to make it stand out? What's the difference between my blog and others.

One, I'm not getting paid.
Two, I have no idea how to spice things up.
Three, my poems aren't filled with fancy images and moving things.

I'm relying on my poetry, but seeing as how the nation's literacy is quickly spinning 'round and 'round the giant urinal cake and down the drain, fewer people are reading (which is one of the reasons why I'm so happy I have the readership I do).

I don't know what my goal is. The face of readership has certainly changed. I wonder what Steinbeck would have become had he published his stuff online, with immediate results. Would he have a following? Would Hemmingway? Would Shakespeare and Mallory?

Part of me thinks that the internet has something to do with low readership. When kids are on it, they're not reading blogs; they're watching YouTube and monitoring everyone else's pointless posts on the Facebook newsfeed and playing games. They're spending time on Twitter, where their lives are reduced to 160 characters.

"Brevity is the soul of wit," said Polonius. All I've seen is people unable to expand upon thought. Witless. And the public school systems think this isn't a problem. We're graduating students from high school who have a middle school comprehension of literature. They're math skills fall into basic algebra, and their scientific reasoning is lost in third grade limbo. The biggest complaint college professors have is that the writing from incoming freshmen is slipshod and rudimentary, some completely unable to make a sentence. A SENTENCE! And why is this?

We spend so much time preparing our students to take a multiple choice test. We aren't teaching them to reason through their answers. We're also teaching them that there is only one correct answer when analyzing text. Which is yet another reason why poetry is no longer enjoyed.

Hence, I'm endeavoring in a project that will not succeed.
But, I still want it to look nice.

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