OMG I haven’t written anything here in a week. (I say OMG to convey the false impression that I’m a text-messaging hipster.)

(Of course, using the word “hipster” probably undercuts whatever I’m trying to convey with OMG. LOL.)

Anyway, I haven’t written anything here in over a week and before that installment, I don’t think I posted anything for a year or so.

What kind of “blogger” blogs once a year? And what kind of idiot makes matters worse by calling his once-a-year blog, “Today’s Rant?” I’m ashamed of myself.

But here’s the thing, see. I make no money except from writing. Written words are my only source of income. And bloggers are like taggers, it turns out: no one pays a guy to blog, just as no one pays a kid to spray-paint graffiti on a wall in the middle of the night. Shocking but true.

Which brings me to something puzzling. At last count (about a year ago) there were some 64 million blogs. So far as I know, none of them turned a dime for the bloggers. I have to wonder: what do these 64 million people do for day jobs? Or do they know of some way to make money from blogging about which I’m clueless.

I’m not saying that’s unlikely. All my life, other people have known of ways to make money while I’ve stood about gawking at their inscrutable shenanigans and wondering: how do they do that? Not that I’ve ever cared much about making money; I’ve always been content with making enough to scrape out life’s necessities. It’s just that the amount I have needed to “scrape by” has gone up and up and up as I’ve grown older and older and older.

In my first six years out of college, I never made more than six thousand a year. Even I look back and wonder if had a night job as a criminal that I don’t remember—how else to explain my survival from one year to the next on money like that?

But no: it was the seventies, and I lived in Portland, Oregon. Back then, in Portland, Oregon, gas cost 25 cents a gallon. My rent in the communal houses I shared with bunches of other people never exceeded more than $50 a month. I fixed my own car–fixed it poorly to be sure: it was always breaking down in terrible places like freeway on ramps at midnight, but you get what you pay for.  I got my clothes out of the 29 cents a pound bin at the local thrift store. Insurance? Don’t make me laugh. Health plan? I was young, why would I ever need to see a doctor?

And I didn’t particularly know that I was poor. I wasn’t happy, but I didn’t think it had anything to do with money or lack thereof. I was depressed about my relationships or lack thereof.  Only years later did I come to realize that for a man at least the two might be connected in some way.

But coming back to bloggers, here’s my point: all the information and disinformation available on the Internet for free has the overall effect of blurring the value of professionalism in information-dispensing. You can find out almost anything from the Internet without paying a dime so why pay a dollar to find out anything?  What you learn might not be true, but hey: you get what you pay for.

As my writer-friend Michael Castleman notes, the abundance of free information online has devalued all information. Everyone knows what body blows new-media has delivered to newspapers; but magazines are in almost as much trouble. Ten years ago, Castleman, a medical journalist, could get one or two thousand bucks for a magazine article. Now, with the magazine industry teetering, he has to write mostly for websites, and they don’t pay the same kind of money for Castleman pieces, not nearly. And why would they? Whatever Castleman has to say, the dedicated web-surfer can probably get the same information for free from some blog some doctor is doing as a vanity project in his/her spare time. Besides, how could websites pay that same kind of money? Most websites are free to the visitor.

Yes, I know about some vague idea floating about that new- media will soon turn a profit by selling advertising, but it hasn’t materialized yet in any major way, so web-based information businesses just don’t have the revenues to pay writers like magazines used to do.

What I’ve just said seems true to me, but what do I know? Maybe it’s not true. And yet, here I am dispensing the opinion for free, and here you are reading it. Don’t complain: you get what you pay for.

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