Soon after most people become acquainted with the RV travel blogosphere, they start to see patterns, enough so that they might classify them like this:
- RV 101 blogs. How to. Chock full of useful information for newbies. They work pretty hard for their nickels and dimes of Google ad income. Too bad there are so many minute details, which are intended to be practical but really aren't, since the reader's circumstances are different than the blogger's. Readers can feel insulted when such blogs appear to offer friendly advice to a "fellow" RVer, but then the reader learns he is just a chump being hit with a thinly-disguised ad. (The Linkbait Syndrome; it gets 'em every time.) Ah dear, the sordid topic of coin...
- RV travelogues. Where are Fred and Mildred today? Aimed at armchair travelers and RV wannabees, these blogs offer pleasant entertainment as long as you live life purely through your eyeballs; mentally you will leave the blog completely starved. Finally escaping to their RV Dream (!!!), they offer scenic postcard after postcard, as well as updates on the world's cutest grandkids. And did I mention the scenery!!! Mildred just knows there is a God because the sunsets are so breathtakingly beautiful. Rhapsodies about sunsets are usually mixed with news about the latest shopping trip to Walmart or the Dollar Store for paper towels or RV toilet paper.
- Latter-day Howard Beals-on-wheels, emphasizing the philosophical underpinnings of unconventional, un-bourgeois lifestyles. Imbued with visions of higher forms of truth, these prophets of the desert are sententious and preachy, abstemious, celibate, impoverished, and a bit mad. Secluded in a gravelly dry wash for over three years, he is finishing his 643 page eBook, "The One and Only Truth for Achieving Ultimate Simplicity." It includes a Google Earth app that locates all the county landfills that allow free overnight parking.
Comments
The only thing I disagree with in your comment is "shows absolutely no ability"; I believe we have the ability what we lack is the WILL.
Of the few blogs I read regularly, I pretty much look forward to yours because you don't load it up with puffy BS and you don't pull any punches in calling out others who do.
I truly believe many people who have blogs do it merely for egotistical reasons. They intently refresh their latest post, waiting and watching for adoration in the comments, pay too much attention to their "hit counters," hoping to someday achieve some magical number that will validate their popularity and are obsessed with meeting their "followers," as if they belong to some sort of admiration society or something.
For me, reading most of the RV type blogs I go to is just mental masturbation, while I take a break. It's a way for me to see how utterly consumed others are in themselves and their "portable, suburban lives."
Yep, portable suburbia... because they're still living the way they did. Only now on wheels, hauling all their crap from one campground to the next, having their tête-à -tête get togethers will all the other portable suburbanites and posting their pablumatic crap about emptying their holding tanks and publishing more pictures of sunsets. YAWN!
Keep up the good work Boonie. You and just a couple others actually entertain and/or educate me.