I spend a lot of my efforts doing secret things. I get great insight from said secret things. It has remained a problem in my writing life what to take and what to give of these insights--which I believe are valuable and useful. One who is gifted with the desire to write must command authorship of his own experience. On the other hand, one whose wellness depends much on keeping my business with others straight demands respecting such. What to give? What to take? How to be in my own five senses and heart and brain without using up that which feeds me. That, I think is my dilemma. But wanting to maintain complete privacy is really based on the assumption that others give a shit. And my bet is the only way anyone does is if I articulate it in such a way that it relates to their lives. Welcome to the congenital writer's strange loop, but the issue I think goes wider.
What really becomes prescient is the mind games us computer user's identities have been wrestling with over the past few years. Who am I on the Internet? What's different about me if you see me in person? Which way do you know me better? Am I truly on a clearer road to becoming my thoughts and feelings in this realm, or should I be judged solely on how that idiot that listens to his thoughts and feelings behaves? (That one is not rhetorical. The answer's the latter). And why in the hell am I somewhere in my little brain, keeping track of what this very vague memory of a person from high school or college is doing on a daily basis, through photos, preferences, and musings? Sure your babies are cute--I just REALLY don't know how to apply that to my life right now. The problem exists such, that I probably know people way better than I should before I meet them eye to eye. I have relationships with people largely based on words, and when I see them I wonder why they don't fly from balconies with magical passions, or conversely, fill my ear with inane observations but instead are kind. Or that I think arrogantly about their terrible judgement because they update frequently their life-consumption patterns, in a different way (though I'd insist STUPIDLY), than I would. There is a mental separation from people here and this causes me anxiety in public encounters with people. Sometimes sadness and despair, even. I looked at your profile in secret, stranger, what do you know about me? Do you even care to know enough about me? You must be healthy in your curiosity and not creepy like me. I don't walk up to a person and say something like, a musing about debt collectors and how it relates to public health insurance options, or wax nostalgia about an early nineties hit song as people go ahead and give the thumbs up. Some people actually do that in person. I don't. I fantasize about sneaking in some of my Emerson bio for useable material, and awkwardly say "Hello. I'm good, thanks." Even if I think you're really really pretty or cool.
There is also, on the other hand, a great familiarity that comes with the Internet. I am privy to a much LARGER number of people's daily thoughts and struggles. Going through normal-life things with those in my circle, somehow makes the pleasure and pains of life seem more familiar. I get this disturbing sense sometimes that there are weekly themes, like a special episode of whatever sitcom I grew up learning lessons from. This week, death. Next week, love. Job getting or why not to lie. What's funny and topical. Maybe then taxes and maybe death again. Standing afar, the themes are comfortingly repetitive and feel something like this adult life I have only begun to sign up for and live. I am growing into both an acceptance and efforts to overcome a pain threshold about settling into my given flesh and brain and making it work OK for me in THIS life. The writing helps. I danced the other day. In public, too. And jumped straight in the water at Barton Springs, instead of easing my way in. And wasn't scared to assert myself to an aggressive statement made about me. And own up to my mistakes without ensuing guilt or shame. Progress. But there are those that think to get things, and those that think about them. It became very clear to me which one I was when I tried to sell door-to-door for two days last summer and started telling people the jig of the deal--and that I could totally understand why this product wasn't a good decision for them. Not because I'm a good guy. I just think I have this awful self-awareness of what is going on. I needed to leave that door, feeling ok about myself after disturbing their peace. But, I really really needed to make to make some money. Still couldn't. I did go home and journal though. And there's this everlasting hunch, which I have tried to kill many a times dismissing it as the "writer's bug," that says this part of me that thinks about things could help. In fact, I have evidence that it does.
So I am trying to take ownership and a more active participation in this Internet game. How I express myself on it in a real way--and simply what I get out of it. I think more people should. I think people are starting to, as it matures. I think it is quite a contemporary thing to do, in fact. Obviously there is something I want out of the Web, beyond being able to look up any song I could possibly think of on YouTube, or stream the same movies with a click that I used to think were mythical because I'd have to hunt the Denver Public Library for them, and once literally take apart a video and repair it, so I could see it. There IS the possibility for a much higher quality, more eccentric, and mindful path of information gathering out here. People are hacking new paths every day. And getting to journal about it too.
I have been writing in good portions over the past two years, and mainly in a confessional style. In the Emersonian sense, there has been a true attempt on my part to seek the Universal in the most private. A true attempt to get meaning from some suffering I have gone through. The suffering may not inspire envy, but certainly provides perspective. This means in the writing I make myself vulnerable to lying, making shallow judgements, and then looking deep into my heart of hearts about what it means to be people ok. I use the words joy, hope, elation, despair, and desperation a lot. I aggrandize ordinary things, and minimize serious shit. All for truth. I am not afraid of drinking the strong coffee and quoting the Old Testament, but also can't process how to have a proper daily routine in my life. When I get uncomfortable I come out of it with poetry. Ugh. Some of it feels decent too, though I still have this overwhelming suspicion it is wimpy and way out of it's time--like, some real Victorian-valued nonsense. But, it's kind of truly how I feel, rather than the hip hop lyricist I wish I was--a little taller and all that jazz. It's a fruitful life right now, and my impression of what the culture values, the entire medium of the Web, and just in general the "times" prevented me from expressing myself in a public forum. But one must eventually dare, because it hurts too much not to. What I started to notice in my journals, was though they were a good exercise and a way to put me in touch with my feelings, they were absolutely not written just for me. I was secretly conspiring in my heart of hearts to revise them, prepare them, and show them.
And social networking be damned, as even I couldn't take my insights seriously in that format. "I am the fruits of hope and wellness, but I must not keep and devour them. Only ripen, preserve, and spread sweet on that which has dried up and lost its intended zest." This FB post lasted forty minutes on my page today, sandwiched in between, bless my "friends," a link about glow-in-the-dark pork and Roswell conspiracy theories. And then there are the angry liberals. The guys that like to take pictures of their food. And the people that are just checking in, here and there and here...again? I have colorful friends, yes, who use FB appropriately. I have always tended to not use things appropriately. And the result was something like a lot of anticipation anxiety of different sects of people in my life, reacting in my head, this way or that, about this genuine, albeit said in a grandiose fashion, thought that came directly as a result of my Tuesday afternoon. And as always, the most random folks on my friends list popped in my head. What in God's name will they make of THAT??? And then the people I hope see it too. Waiting for little red numbers to activate in the corner of my screen...What? I am a thirty damn year old man. What? What a mess. For a writer, who should only be writing for his subject's sake, this is an utter mess. Hence the take down. Hence the finally getting around to making a blog.
Here's the advantage of a blog. This blog has one reader, and it is the imagined reader I think of while I am writing. The reader of this blog is always my true friend. That discerns my ideas in a reasonable way. That empowers me to reveal my thoughts to the best of my ability and forgives me when I make mistakes along the way. This reader wants my success. This is a space I own that must be sought out. If it is read by zero actual people, I’m still going to write it. If it is a million, I am still going to write it the same way. I am not going to be swayed except by the breeze of my own experience--or the heavy winds, as they may be. Strength, as relating to trees, bends as a defense against breaking. So this blog insists on the radical stance of trusting myself completely and not others’ suggestions to it. Networking and expanding readership never comes at the expense of changing the content. I will share about my life in thought. I will reveal my story in candid and embarrassing bits. I will reveal what I can. Sometimes humbly, sometimes full of myself, but always with an aim to interest the reader. I will talk plainly to a deep-thinking, generous, engaged, and tolerant reader who cares what I have to say. It is not magic nor does it think it can heal others in their struggles. But based on all the healing I have gotten out of the written word in my life, it will have a mind to. There will be an attempt to give, and to see, and maybe make someone laugh or cry or go AHA! It is MINE. ALL are welcome. None of this sincerity, fervor, and nakedness may make sense in a personal blog (just what the world needs another of, I know), but I'm gonna try it on. I can begin to see this vision now taking shape….I want to start today and tomorrow and the next day.
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