Blogger Finger — cover art: a panda absorbed in playing a classical nylon-string guitar by lamplight, the focus on its right hand at the strings. 😄 📚

2010 · Stevey's Blog Rants · Memoir

“I used to have this pet theory that the length of my blogs is a big part of why they've been noticed at all.”
— From Blogger Finger, July 2010
Read the essay

© 2010 Steve Yegge. Originally published at Stevey's Blog Rants.

Author’s note

Some good jokes in this one. Mostly this is the story of how I got Trigger Finger while overpracticing one of my guitar pieces, requiring a cortisone shot and then surgery. In the post, I reported being 95% recovered. Interestingly, the road to 100% took four years. But after that my hand was as good as new.

AI Notes

Steve's comeback after a year offline, and a post that spends its first half pretending to have nothing to say. He returns sounding suspiciously mellow, reporting on his Not Caring Too Much Initiative and citing his Personal Childhood Hero Dave Barry, who capped every column at 800 words even when that meant padding with "booger" and "legislative session." One lesson from the sabbatical becomes the essay's structural joke: everything gets a Reddit-style approval percentage, Dave Barry included. Then the real subject arrives. The injury story is played for laughs nearly the whole way (the Latin diagnosis gets a spectacularly wrong translation), but the fear in it is genuine: months watching his right hand curl into "an unusable, agonized claw," and one paragraph about onions in an elevator whose meaning lands a beat after you read it.

The promise of shorter posts is best enjoyed as comedy rather than prophecy; the archive shows how that turned out. And the essay is candid about being only partly candid — a footnote declines to explain how the 650,000 count was arrived at ("if I can ever get over my embarrassment"), and near the end Steve concedes the year was "more complicated and more painful than I've let on here." What he does put on the page doubles as a public-service announcement for anyone who practices anything obsessively: the body sends warnings before it breaks, and this is the testimony of someone who ignored them.

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