Exorcism

This weekend I wrote to a good friend I hadn't heard from in several weeks to check in, noting that she would probably know what was up with us here in Tucson from reading our blogs.

She replied this morning that she had been too busy to read them and asked for a personal update.

I complied, prefacing my account by saying that, "the strange thing about blogs -- maybe it isn't so strange -- is that, once you've written about something in that capacity, it's hard to write about it again. It's a bit like exorcism."

At some point, I will probably write something "official" about blogging. As a prelude to that exercise, I've been giving a lot of thought to two interrelated aspects of the blogging phenomenon:

A) the way in which blogs coerce a certain kind of response from their readers; and

B) the resistance that certain readers of blogs -- who often declare that they aren't blog readers -- exhibit in the face of that coercion.

How's this for a title: "The Resistance to Blogging."

My provisional theory is that blogs complicate our sense of what constitutes an obligation.

Can a burden you exorcise by writing be transformed into a gift for others?