A lot of people I know are getting engaged / married, and I have a lot of "photographer" friends on Facebook. Well, not a lot, if I had a lot, I would quit Facebook, but there are a few. And then I have few "model" friends as well, and soon I expect a model friend to marry a photographer friend and live up to the stereotype, then there is the epic drama that follows their statistically probable divorce, but

I am digressing.  If you are wondering about the relation between engagements/marriages/photographers/models, they're all posting their "professional" photos on Facebook and it is annoying the crap out of me, I mean, they are all looking so fucking beautiful and I hate it!  When I say beautiful, I don't mean the natural beauty the poets poet about, I am talking about the oh-so-adorable plastic barbie look. Everyone is looking so spotless and perfect, some of them even look like wax statues of their parents, I guess I was a little too late when I found out about the whole "plastic is the new black" thing and now it has become mainstream, is it too late to embrace it ?

He told me he was Death and that my time was up.

His memory had failed him, he had to struggle a lot to find that place - in the middle of nowhere, it stood there, alone and aloof, like a big condescending judgement. The last time when he was here -  it was years ago.  He didn't know why he came back to that room after all these years. May be because it reminded him of a time when he was free from all worries, a much simpler time, no wife, no kids, no responsibilities and no share holders haunting his nightmares, he was alone in the world without a care, he didn't have this high paying job for which he had sacrificed his very soul, he was broke back then, but he was happy. 

Kate didn't know what she wanted when she came back to her home town. A lot had changed, the old ice-cream parlour where she used to hang out with her girlfriends was now a spa, her favourite second-date movie theater had disappeared into a mall. Then she remembered that she had moved away from this place looking for spas and malls. Nothing was ever good enough for her. The hope for the warmth and nostalgia that she came craving for was turning into a shrill cry of despair. When the hard realization struck her, she wanted to cry out loud. Just stand in there and cry, in the middle of nowhere, just scream out loud. She craved for her old friends, the attention, the love and the security.

"When the lights went out, she knew she was going to be stabbed by the proverbial dagger." - Photo courtesy Joshi Daniel

She curled up into the little nook by his side, kissed him on his shoulder. She wanted to wake him up, talk to him, laugh - like they used to, but she knew better. She knew he was too tired and she was worried - this wasn't the man she fell in love with, she longed for him, the cute kid in glasses who used to make her laugh. When she looked at his tired old glasses on their nightstand, she felt even the glasses said the same thing - he has turned into someone else, a machine, a workaholic who never cared for his health or her. She involuntarily kept drawing circles with her finger on his hairy chest.

"What's bothering you ?", his deep calm voice startled her, he wasn't sleeping after all. 

"I thought you were sleeping...", she smiled at him. He did not open his eyes, but smiled back, like somehow he knew she was smiling at him.

"Its you, you've been working on this project days on end, you don't eat, you don't sleep, hell you don't even brush your teeth...", she just found a vent. 

"I thought it was because I wasn't spending enough time with you...", he chuckled. 

"Well, yeah...that too", she knew that was why she was upset, but she also knew that telling him that would mean she was being selfish, and then she felt helpless, the man knew her inside out. 

"Ever heard of the Macbeth's dagger ?" - he asked out of nowhere, that was unusual, even for him. Then without waiting for her answer, he went on, "Its from a Shakespeare's play called Macbeth - Macbeth was the kings kinsman, that's like a Noble man - his wife and him conspires and kill the king with a dagger for very selfish reasons. "

"Selfish reasons ? And what exactly is a dagger ?" - She was amused that he was talking, even though it was about things she wouldn't normally prefer. 

He let out a silent laugh and then went on to maintain his silence for a while before he spoke again, "A dagger is like a sword, but small and handy but not too small to be a knife. Before Macbeth kills his king, he has this inner confrontation between his sense of freewill and predestination, eventually he submits to his baser urges and decides to follow the vision of a dagger that would eventually kill his king." 

"Why are you telling me this now", she had to ask.

"Because I am facing an inner confrontation and I am going to follow my baser urges", he then turned over, dragged her onto his frame effortlessly, kissed her forehead. When the lights went out, she knew she was going to be stabbed by the proverbial dagger.  

This is an open letter to all the self proclaimed / wanna-be bloggers and you, so if you're neither of these, you shouldn't probably read it. You have been warned.

Dear self-proclaimed/wanna-be blogger,

Hello, you don't know much about me, I am a deranged reader of your blogs, I don't have much to look forward in this life since you ruined it with the atrocities..., wait I will get to that in a minute. Yes, I know you, I know everything there is to know about you.

You are a techie, i.e. an engineering student or similar (no, we don't consider polytechnic as engineering anymore). You are most definitely on Facebook, because you are way too cool to be on Orkut, MySpace died a long time ago but you are not smart enough to be on Twitter, which is why each time someone says something that even remotely sounds like micro-blogging (like microbiology), you come up with a "Twitter is lame.." comment which you and your obnoxious little friends will pass off as a joke. 

Those were the days of glory, when you thought you owned/dominated Facebook with the said obnoxious group of little sadists, but one fine Sunday morning while you overslept because it was too cold and comfy, the literature students somehow made it into Facebook. As it turns out, a lot of hot dumb chicks made it into Facebook too. One would assume that they came with the flow but what you did not know was that, they were all part of a carefully designed strategy to get you out of Facebook and make Facebook stink like Orkut. 

But my conspiracy theories wouldn't interest you right now. You are more interested in what happened to the hot girls who made it in to Facebook. When you heard hot dumb chicks, your engineering brain naturally came to the logical conclusion that you should "impress" them (okay, there is a very deliberate pun in there, go figure). Repeatedly posting your IQ test results and "How smart are you" application results did not do it - no likes, no comments - What were you thinking ?

The first thing you should have had done was to remove all your wall posts and comments that ended with "...that is the equivalent of an English degree" - For e.g. fugly guy hooked up with a fugly girl and posted a pic in Facebook, and what did you comment? You said - "that's the hookup equivalent of an English degree". That didn't work out too well with the literature nerds, did it? Then you thought - "If literature is what it takes, then I will do exactly the same. I will "literate" the crap out of these girls" and then you went ahead and started that silly little blog of yours.

Not just any blog, the one with all the little widgets, complicated JavaScript applets that float around the screen, those weird fonts and font sizes, the networked blogging tools that let other big time losers like you connect with each other, but seriously, what is with the fish ? And the penguin ? and the music widgets and the playlists - yes, I do enjoy listening to every song you like, particularly those rap music tracks that you thought you would autoplay and give your blog a ghetto personality.

Have you ever been to a blog, other than yours using a slow internet connection and only to be welcomed by "To the window... To the wall"?  And after having searched and searched for the music widget to get it to stop, only to realize that stop button does not work? Consider yourself lucky if your visitors have a slower connection, there is a possibility that the meaningless charade of noise may sound like music to them. The same goes for the autoplay videos as well, scared the shit out of me one night when I opened a blog link and after five minutes, a video at the bottom of the page which I didn't know about, started screaming.

Then you decided to take it to the next step - aloha blog awards! which, I believe, is the lamest thing ever. One day someone decided that they needed a little more "visibility" and "page-rank" and thought, "hey if I start a blog award system, it will get me a few back links" but most of you didn't know this, you thought you were actually (read virtually) getting an award because you were an achiever, then I'm sorry to inform you that you're sadly mistaken. The blogs awards are, to put it in your own terms, the award equivalent of an English degree. So if you need better ranking and visitors, try using a hot girl's picture as your display image. If you want to use your own picture and you are not hot then try adding a little red/yellow/orange tinge to the picture, that always seems to give the image's hot-quotient a much required bump in the right direction.

Things got progressively worse when people decided to take it to yet another higher level - competitions and contests. Now if it is for a cause, I support the cause, I might even consider donating a few bucks if ever a day comes when I am not broke or whining about not being broke, but that doesn't mean I support the junk you write in the name of the cause or the contests and competitions you hold in its name. Ofcourse, a blog competition is a good marketing technique and congratulations to whoever came up with that idea, though I can not help but wonder if they knew it would be so easy to puppet you bloggers with your egos.

After having read all this, which I doubt, because I might have already exceeded your attention span, You might think I actually hate you. The sad truth is, I don't. I took all this trouble to write this so that I can help you liberate me of this misery. So here are a few points that I'd like you to read so that a deranged reader won't chase you down to kill you the next time he sees you in person.

1. Please don't send me the same link via IM, Facebook, Twitter, Buzz, Email, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Reader, Technorati, Delicious (Do you see where this is going?) - infact, don't send me the link at all! I know you have a blog, you were kind enough to inform me when you started blogging (sigh). I have added a RSS Subscription, it means I will automatically get a notified as soon as you post something. Ergo, there is no need to give me your blog link after every other post you make.

2. Please, for the love of God, stop confusing  their, there and they're! They mean different things and are NOT interchangeable. The same goes for you're and your - different things. Haven't enough people told you already?

3. Yes, I appreciate your comments, okay, who am I kidding, I don't. The only reason you are posting a comment is because you want a link back to your blog. If the author is a girl, you will post something like, "Hey! Great post! " even if you didn't understand half the shit in the post, mostly because you don't have what it takes to understand the good stuff or may be because the girl authors are one of those literature geeks you are trying to impress and they don't even make sense half the time, okay, all the time(word on the street is that they are not supposed to), their blogs are an outlet for the indescribable rage caused by an endorphin high - And if the author is a guy, you will leave behind a comment that implies that whatever stupid thing the author has said is stupid, and the only stupid thing that is not stupid is the stupid thing that you said on your stupid blog, seriously, what's with the ego ? and then you will post a link back to your blog. And thy work is done. Do not comment, unless you have a point to make.

4. I strongly believe that each person is entitled to blog about whatever they want, but then again, writing about the new puppies you got with pictures and a footnote "cute na?" makes me want to kill you, and your puppies. I mean it. Content is important. Never write for the sake of writing, don't write because you promised yourself "one post each day for the next ten days" - that's just ten crappy posts. Write because you want to, because you feel it, not because you want me to chase you down with a pickax and... yeah, that.

5. Presentation is as important as the content, a lot of unnecessary widgets make your blog a lot slower to load, and the only reason blog page loading frustration doesn't claim as many lives as road rage is because the owner of the blog isn't there in front of you to punch, run over or decapitate. Presentation also includes spell check, proper punctuation, grammar, etc. Good posts are simple posts, the ones you can easily understand, not the dots made at random points because you were on a marijuana high, your reader don't want to connect the dots for you, especially the ones that are way outside the canvas. Keep it clean, keep it neat, and don't let it stink. 

Happy Blogging,
Sincerely yours,
Nick.

PS : I wanted to name this post "click, boink and zoom" because I was going to write about the new generation photographers, then I thought, hell, these bloggers need some spanking first.

Here is an unedited version of this post, the one I wrote before my editor hit my head with a tire iron. 

We all wear a mask, infact several masks. Everyone. Every single day.  Sometimes we wear them so much, we forget who we really are. And then if you are lucky, very lucky, there will come along a person, who will take off your masks, show you the light, and tell you who you are. Who you should be. 

I promised myself I'll write about this when the count exceeds 100. Today, right now, it just did.