Temporarily beaten by an underhanded theme author who set up a theme to generate maleficent encrypted code once the theme was activated, I very nearly gave up the ship.

Don’t pull this crap on me when I’m in a bad mood–which is nearly all the time these days. It makes me want to chuck the whole blogging business right into the old water closet I tell ya’

But give in I did not. I beat back the shadows of blogging depression and plowed my way through my WordPress core files and database until I was satisfied that all was spic and span.

But I’m still going to keep the default Kubrick theme.

I don’t have to worry about compatibility, non-compliance (well, mostly anyway), badly coded script, loaded up error logs and the like. Just good old plain vanilla.

So to heck with all this theme hunting and modifying and correcting and so on and so forth in the name of being “unique”. Who needs “unique” these days when the Default theme is available? I can pretty much guarantee that I’m one of the relatively few that actually run the thing.

Ironically enough, while poking around my cPanel, I found out that it was time to renew this here domain for another year (the 4th one—silly me). So I did.

Four years?

Seems my pretty little theme had some encrypted coding stuffed into it that I missed. And when I found it I couldn’t surgically remove it without screwing up the whole works so into the trash it went.

Now I’m stuck with the default theme. I may just damn well leave it too since I don’t know whether anything else is infected or not.

Shit.

Edit: Everything else appears copacetic…lucky me. I’m still disgusted.

So things are back to sub-normal around here and I’m already to write up a couple more posts but unfortunately it’s bedtime for this bonzo so it will just have to wait until morning. Sorry to disappoint all of you like this but sometimes a man has to do what a man has to do especially when it comes to sleeping. Seems I need all the recharging I can get these days.

Well obviously. Otherwise I wouldn’t be experiencing a conundrum now would I? But is it insecurity in my writing that’s causing the problem here? I had to look into this and what I saw surprised me just a bit. Where blogging is concerned, I found that I’m not insecure about writing. In fact, as I dug down deeper, I realized I never was. Go figure.

You see, I never had a problem with idea that I’d be publishing my ideas, thoughts and meanderings for all the world to see (and comment upon) when I first thought of joining the Blogosphere. It was an exciting thought to be truthful about it and besides…I knew who I was so I figured I didn’t have to try and fool anybody with some false persona, not that I ever could. For some reason, I find I can’t be anyone but me. And that seemed to be one of the great things about blogging; I could be myself. A unique among the unique.

The problem, I found out, is not insecurity so much as frustration. Frustration with my limitations. My mind, the amazing thing that it is, is constantly coming up with all these wonderful subjects and prose and concepts one right after another and if that was all I needed to run my blog then my Adsense earnings would be a heck of lot higher than they are now. The problem here is that the rest of me is stupid. I have stupid fingers that refuse to get the hang of touch typing so by the time I’ve typed out the first paragraph of a post, my mind has already come up with a half a dozen more, became extremely exasperated with my lack of output and went off for a couple beers somewhere leaving me to wallow in a fugue of forgetfulness.

I’m an inline spell checker’s nightmare with two fingers and the worst part about it is I’m a absolutely obsessed with correct spelling. If there’s one thing that turns a great piece of content right on it’s ear (IMHO), it’s misspellings. I remember reading an excerpt once from Stephen King’s On Writing that you should never use an inline spell checker while writing since all it does is distract you from the job at hand. You’re job is to write! Not chase little red snakes all over the word processor. Once a section is finished, then you can run a spell checker over the thing. Unfortunately, I’ve never seemed to master the ability to ignore that little red line from hell that resides under words such as jist, gaurd, or cumudgeon nor have I ever managed to turn the inline spell checker off…on purpose that is.

Punctuation is another shortfall of mine. If it ain’t a period, comma, question mark or exclamation point, I’m lost. Simple as that. I suppose I could go and take a quick course on what punctuation actually is and how to properly apply it within a paragraph but that would take time away from my writing.

It’s the Catch 22 of blogging. I can’t take time off from blogging to learn how to write, can’t people understand this?

Hmmm.

I guess I just proved Liz’s point, huh?

Okay, so I’m out of balance, I admit it. I refuse to publish something that looks like some poor mind blown ex-air traffic controller partially wrote during a period of momentary lucidity. It could very well be that I’m making the classic mistake of scrutinizing myself a little too closely these days instead of going with the flow of the thing. It could very well be that I’ve picked myself completely apart a half hour before I even start is more like it so the obvious solution here is to…

Knock it right the hell off! Scrutinizing that is.

Don’t you think?

So here’s to you Liz, you did it again. Whether I like it or not, you made me take a long look at myself and instead of the easy going blogging lad that I once was, I found an uptight, stressed out hard case that let life past and present get to him. Of course finding a way to balance things out again is going to be a whole new adventure in itself.

I suppose I’ll have to blog about it.

If I place my hands in the proper typing position my left hand is laying in the middle of the QWERTY portion of the keyboard and the fingers of my right hand are hovering somewhere between the "Right Click" menu key and the "Enter" key (thumb and forefinger respectively) to the "\", "Delete" and "Up Arrow" (middle, ring and little finger respectively).

It’s all WRONG!

The power strips, surge protectors, power cords, wires and such are crammed under the desk to the point where I don’t dare to move my feet around much for fear of knocking out CPU right in the middle of my finest piece of writing (good safety margin there since I figure that probably won’t  happen in this lifetime–the writing that is). But I’d really hate to bust off any connectors attached to one of the horribly overpriced, common as dirt, computer cables they sell today.

Ya’ wanna buy a 3 ft USB cable? Only $32.95? Onna stick?

I’ve stuffed all the "Save That! It Might Be Needed Later!" type of crap under, inside and outside my highly limited desk space that’s located in my highly limited desk area and since "Later" hasn’t seemed to roll around yet even after 3 years and more, I guess an overhaul of the blogging area is in order.

So that’s the next step in this quest to get things straightened out.

I think I’ll start this now. I just love pulling out wires.