Meta-wankery

The thought just struck me — here I sit, browsing and reading the old posts of this blog of mine, the address of which is known to nobody but myself; I read what I have written a few days or weeks ago, and in due time I will sit down to write some more material to which to return and re-read it in future times, and so on; and I begin to wonder: is this not a kind of wankery? Is this any better than one of the scenes with Frodo and Gollum in one of the Lord of the Rings movies, with Frodo fondly stroking his ring, and Gollum sitting a couple of meters away, his back turned towards the camera, and making exactly the same gestures only without a ring in his hands, crouched in almost in the same position as if he were literally masturbating? Are there not some deep and slightly pathological Freudian undertones in all this?

And here's another contribution to the rapidly expanding genre: the concept of monocle polishing, popularized on kuro5hin.org. Doesn't the very term sound like wanking? And whenever I think of it, I think of some aged Victorian-era aristocrat who, having sadly lost the ability to polish his knob (his joints are stiff with gout, except for the one joint that really matters — bwah hah hah, how's that for an execrable pun?), now has to resort to polishing his monocle instead.

And this post, wanking about wankery, does it not fully deserve its title of meta-wankery?

And how many people before me have written about these same things (including the concern expressed by this very sentence, for you lovers of self-reference), vainly trying to pretend that they were being profound? And how many have written about all of this, knowing damn well all the time that they aren't being the least bit clever at all, let alone profound?

Not that I think there's anything wrong with wankery, mind you. On the contrary. But I can't help noticing that it has a somewhat bad reputation in some circles (not in circle-jerking circles, of course; I know, I know, another horrible pun; I couldn't help it). So I can't quite help feeling just a tiny little bit guilty about going through my old posts for the umpteenth time. But I guess I'll get used to it...