I've got "Comfortably Numb" echoing in my head: "Hello... is anybody IN there? Just nod if you can hear me"...
I never intended for this to be the place I post my feelings IN PLACE of expressing them aloud...
Frankly, I was pretty turned off to the idea of even having this blog for a long time. I knew exactly what would happen. I'd come here instead of to my friends to bitch and moan, to get something off my chest, to wax poetic about politics and brain tumors and the like... Something about the laws of energy just don't allow me to tell the same story twice with the same amount of gusto each time. It's either here, or in person... and the cycle is a nasty one; the more I do it here, the more I do it here.
And I think it's happening. I'm coming here more. And I'm not happy about it. And I'm concerned that I live two lives: one here and one out there. Is this what happens when one converts their innermost lives into public content? If it is, then I'm going to have to stop with the Deep Thoughts, and trim this back to funny anecdotes about buying jeans. Because I don't like the idea that I'm unreadable in real life and knowable here and only here. I don't like the idea that everyone is talking to my face and having a meta-conversation with the space just slightly above my head. "Oh yeah? Really? That's not what your blog said. I KNOW what your blog said and you're actually pretty upset right now".
I feel like I've got to refer back to this thing all the time, and it gets tiresome, frankly.
And I'm also tired of everyone asking me if i've read their blog. No, I haven't. And I haven't updated this one, so stop asking. And I have a life to live, and a paper journal to fill, where most of my writing goes. If you want to know, ask. And if you want me to know YOU, tell me. Is this what the age of information has done to us? Made us all foamy at the mouth with the thrill of thinking someone has seen us online, that we've connected to another human being in Ohio somewhere in some significant way, that we don't actually put any effort into actual face time with people? And we brush it off by saying, "Well, I blogged about it, so..."
There must be a law of equilibrium out there with this kind of thing. As in: for every blog writer who doesn't read blogs, there are three blog readers who don't blog. I am the non-reading type. Is it right to presume SOMEone is reading this? And that my karmic debt to read (and care about it) is cancelled because I am providing something for others to read?
Here's the thing about it all: for me, up until the moment I started this thing, the Internet was just a giant encyclopedia. If I wanted to find out when to plant my corn, what the difference between accrual and cash method accounting was, or who was playing the club on Saturday.... I'd just hop on the web. Now it's become a place I can be found. And I either need to get used to the celebrity, (however minor), or throw in the online writing towel.
Comments
LOLO-This is a fascinating commentary. It has fueled brain activity. I am a blog reader/non writer. Actually, I don’t read that many blogs either. I have 4 or 5 books going at any one time. A fractured Geminian.