MemeMachineGo!

=v= Apologies to my millions of loyal readers, but for years, the length of things I've been writing has been shrinking. I blame email/Usenet/etc., though to be fair, email/Usenet/etc. has inspired me to write more overall. Still, the trend has been worrisome and you haven't seen much of me around here lately.

While I haven't hit TXT MSG levels of terseness (Kids these days! Go figure!), I knew something was up when I had a popular coinage with "Folds Up!" -- a folding bike ride organized by the groups TIME'S UP! Technically, I only wrote 50% of that. My next hit was "Trees Not Cars," which might seem to be something I wrote 75% of, though the whole concept of "pros Not cons" is pretty derivative.

My biggest hit to date has been"Still We Ride," and indeed it catapulted me to a fancy midtown Manhattan party where I met the guy who came up with Zed's favorite saying, "One Less Car." Alas, though, I must confess that I was only riffing off of "Still We Rise," which was itself inspired by the poem "Still I Rise," by Maya Angelou (who is, thankfully, too classy to come kick my white ass). So I only wrote 10% of that. One letter! Could I sink any lower?

Perhaps. There's a cautionary Mr. Boffo strip that I've virtually clipped and put up on my virtual fridge: a panhandler with a blank sign, and the caption, "Writer's Block: Worst Case Scenario."

Well, I've been exploring a new prose form: photo captions on my Flickr account. Terse, yes, but people seem to like them, even to the point of sending me kudos! Consequentially, my captions have gotten longer. Who knows? I might start writing blog-length stuff again.