I’ve never actually tried crack cocaine before (at least not to my knowledge or willingly, unless coffee is really crack cocaine in disguise, in which case I’ve tried it and I love it like a hooker loves pleather thigh highs and conscientious manscaping), but I’m 99% positive blogging is exactly like it.

For starters, crack cocaine is not easy to come by or smoke. I think. I mean, I’m pretty sure. I’ve never personally been walking down the street and seen something powdery or rockish and thought to myself, Hey, self, that there is crack cocaine just waiting here for somebody to take it and smoke it, nor have I been asked to sample any at the grocery store. It’s the sort of thing you really have to have connections to obtain. And getting one’s hands on it is only half the battle. Once you do, you’ve got to somehow find a place to cook and smoke that shit.

I don’t quite understand how people actually get past finding someone to buy it from, cooking it up with a spoon and lighter, and then stuffing the hardened result into a pipe (is that how it works? does it then harden and turn into a rock? or is cooking it in a spoon and inhaling the fumes one way to do it?) and smoking it in secret places to actually find it a worthwhile practice, but I suppose this isn’t at all unlike blogging.

Think about it. Crafting a blog post is oftentimes a painfully tedious process, one rife with writer’s block and vocabulary snafus and general I-suck-at-this-itis, not to mention one which requires a blogger to locate and inhabit a secret typing space free from distraction and nosy busy bodies.  Totally like finding, cooking up, and smoking crack cocaine.

And then there’s the high associated with the smoking of said narcotic — a euphoric sensation of weightlessness and I’m-top-of-the-world-essness that comes with being filled with all that cracky goodness. The same holds true for blogging. Once a blogger hits publish on her platform and sees the fruits of her labor, it’s like her soul embarks on a rainbow-filled journey with unicorns and mermen and calorie-free ice cream for eternity. Nothing can bring that blogger down.

Except for the inevitable crash that follows the oh-so-glorious high. With crack cocaine, the user’s comedown is characterized by itchiness, exhaustion, paranoia, and an intense desire for more (or at least that’s what narcanon.org and overly-dramatic crime series’ will have you believe). With blogging, the writer’s comedown is not so different.  The first sign of the crash usually results from one of three things: a comment from a troll, a sudden decrease in readership, or no readership at all. This can leave the blogger desperate for positive reinforcement and/or jonesin’ for the satisfaction that comes from having produced something tangible and representative of one’s intellectual efforts.

Of course, we can’t forget just how highly addictive both crack cocaine and blogging are. Much like Halloween candy and little kids, crack creates in junkies an intense desire for more in as little as 10-15 minutes after smoking it and makes some users so desperate for it that they resort to things like hookin’, theft, assault, and general dereliction. I have yet to sell my hootenanny in the name of blogging, but I can say with certainty that I did fantasize about doing some unsavory things to the support staff over at my former hosting company when they suspended my account for crashing their servers with too much traffic that one time.

Don’t come between a girl and her blog readers is all I’m sayin’, m’kay?

It’s for these reasons that I’m quite certain blogging and crack cocaine are nearly identical. I may not have singe marks on my fingers and lips, but I do have a nasty case of carpel tunnel and an unrelenting desire to check my stats multiple times per day, and I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure those are basically the same things.

All I have to say is be careful out there, kids. Today it’s Tumblr. Tomorrow it may be needle-ridden mattresses in abandoned high rises. ONE CAN NEVER BE TOO CAUTIOUS.