Does it ever seem like somehow, without anyone planning it, blogging just sort of ended?

I look over the list of blogs I generally follow (almost to a one they’re friends blogs, though some only after I began to follow as a reader), and on by one, they’re quitting, going on extended hiatus, moving, or just sort or dying of attrition.

Is it just my circle? Have we just sort of all spent our wad, as it were, all at the same time? Or is it everywhere?

Maybe a wave just crested; to mis-quote Hunter S Thompson, maybe we’re at that place where the wave finally brakes and rolls back.

Or maybe we’re just all too busy; we’ve built a debt of wasted time and now we need to pay, working harder for all the time we spent blogging about the work were were not getting done.

I’m not sure what it is; but it seems to be going on everywhere.

Maybe it’s that we’re so over-saturated with outlet. Facebook, myspace, meebo, bebo, flickr, fetlife; twitter and jaiku and plurk and pownce, orkut and friendster, okcupid, adult-freind-finder, livejournal, and a hundred more college boys are hacking up now.

We have so many places to talk about ourselves, that no one can ever find each other; and when we do, who can read it all?

Or maybe it’s me; maybe I’m just tired of reading and not writing. Because, egotist that I am, I cannot read a blog when comments are off, cannot browse a forum unless I’m signed on to post. Maybe my own failure of output deadens my desire for input.

Yet, still, I see blogs ending all around me, writers closing doors vocally or silently. It means something, even if I’m not sure what.

What’s interesting, though, is that I suddenly feel motivated to create. And I know, this time, exactly why. Several friends from other sites have, lately, happened upon my fiction; and their interest, their feedback, sparks my desire, sparks my writer’s voice. I remember why i did this.

I’ve never been that kind of artist who creates for the act of creation, then destroys of gives away. I’ve never been the un-signed artist who leaves beauty scattered behind. I create, simply, because it feels so very good to give that gift to someone. It is, almost exactly, like the engendering orgasm; that moment of power, control. I am, completely and utterly, in control of your pleasure and pain, and I see/feel/hear it.

It isn’t simply the joy of creation; it’s the joy on control, the joy on causing joy.

I like to think, given the tools, and the solitude, I would create. Mountain top, or dungeon cell, or lonely island, I would create to create. But in truth I wouldn’t. I’d do what I’ve been doing the last two years; I’d start, and then I’d start again, and then I’d start again, and never finish. Creating for no one is masturbation with no orgasm, it’s cooking food no one will eat.

Art should be for arts sake, we like to say, but I cannot find my creativity there. I find it in my audience.

My hope – and it may be in vain, because time is never on my side these days – is that an audience of only one, may be enough.

Who knows, though. Maybe flood-gates will open, not just for me but for all of us. Maybe we just need something to write about.