The Megalomania Arrives Right on Schedule

The German blog charts had me hovering just outside the top 100, and something in my brain misfired spectacularly. The voice in my head—the one that sounds exactly like Monkey D. Luffy announcing he’ll be King of the Pirates—said the obvious thing: I want to be King of the Bloggers.

Yes, I gamed it slightly. I cheated a little on the rankings and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But looking at what was already up there—the endless circular complaints, bloggers suing each other over ad copy, everyone polishing their Google relationships—I felt righteously entitled to my shortcut. The only guy who seemed to have kept his dignity was the one running Basic Thinking, and I didn’t especially want to knock him off anything.

The thing about early blogging megalomania is that it was sincere in a way that’s almost embarrassing now. You genuinely believed that enough links and comments and trackbacks added up to something—that the architecture of mutual attention was building toward a kingdom. You knew it probably didn’t work that way. But the delusion was generative. It made you post every day and care too much and pick fights in the comments and track your stats like a fever chart.

I believed in this journal the way Luffy believes in his crew. Completely, loudly, and without any realistic assessment of the odds.