A quick thought or three before I head to bed after a 14-hour workday, in preparation for another one tomorrow…
Someone asked me last week if I thought it was weird to have people know what’s going on in my life without my telling them directly. I’m assuming she meant to ask if it’s weird to have people log on to the site, without directly contacting me, and getting a glimpse into my world.
They might be getting a glimpse into my world, but what they are most certainly NOT getting is a glimpse into my life.
There seems to be a collective identity crisis going on in the blogging world, which only highlights its inherent narcissism. Now that the shine has worn off the blogging world, now that the newness is gone…what’s left? How many links can you really throw in your sidebar? How many one-paragraph posts that include 6 links to other’s content can you really have? How many essays on the relative merits of today’s cup of coffee can you really have before you yourself start to question the validity of your own space in CyberLand?
Loko it’s really simple: anybody who comes here comes for the content, not for me. I may display the content, allowing it escape from my umcomfy psyche at random intervals, but the only time I’ll bring myself up is the largely be the butt of a joke. Just doesn’t matter to me. You don’t know me. You don’t know what’s going on in my life, as “confessional” as this site might be. If making a fool of “myself” gets a laugh and two more readers, hey, like the philosopher Kirsten Dunst said, “Bring it on!”
If you don’t like this site, I don’t take it personally. If you don’t like me, I don’t take it personally, since you can’t possibly know me. It’s a win-win, really. Some people get neurotic about their blogs because there is no disconnect between the blog and themselves. Simply no buffer.
I sidestep that issue nicely. I have very little self-confidence, except when it comes to my ability to write with a decent amount of skill. Ergo, I avoid my insecurities and leapfrog straight into my vanities. Exxxxxxxxcellent, Smithers.
I can probably count the number of readers I’ve actually met or known on all 20 digits of my body. Another dozen or so I IM or email on a decently regular basis. The rest of you…well, you’re all pretty little things in my head. You like caramel apples and horseback rides and watching “Raider of the Lost Ark” at an outdoor screen on a brisk late-spring evening. OK, not literally, but you get the point. As for you, you get a sliver of me, to be sure, but you largely get a collective fiction. There is “Ryan”, this guy who appears on this blog, and there is Ryan, the guy behind the keyboard sipping a Nantucket Nectar Half-and-Half while trying to string together a few coherent thoughts before he is lulled into a buffalo wing-induced coma.
This site also features “The Commander”, who is certainly not Tim, my best friend. There’s a part of Tim in “The Commander” (aka "Pecs"), but by and large “Ryan” and “The Commander” are a collective work of fiction, created and being created all the time by not only the two of us. The commentors on the blog add their bit to the collective fiction. And finally, the people who lurk in the shadows add their projected images into the general “Wading in the Velvet Sea” psyche.
(And no, don’t tell us what we’re doing in your head, I’m not really ready to share that much with the group just yet. Especially if it involves pole-dancing. If you want to delurk, wave, say hi, talk about the curtains or something.)
So, all I have to do is have interesting thoughts, not an interesting life. I do have quite the interesting life, especially lately. Lot of really big, interesting, scary, and exciting things, all flying at warp speed. But this is hardly the forum to share it.
It’s a touch dangerous to share everything with the world; it’s equally dangerous to get attached to someone through a simple CSS layout. Works both ways. It’s easy for me to pretend this blog is a quiet booth in a neighborhood bar, and I’m sharing with y’all everything that’s on my mind over a pint of Bass Ale. It’s just as it is to empathize with someone you’ve never met through the words on their webpage, thinking you hold the key, the answer, the solution to every problem that they present in the fictional world you see as real.
There is value in my readership, and the readership of all blogs…the trick is to acknowledge its importance in relation to that of your friends and (hopefully) family. To say the former is not the latter is not to devalue the former…it’s also not meant to place a postmodern twist in which “knowledge” is ever-fleeting on this website. (Hey, it’s everyone’s favorite party game: “Displace the Center of the Blog!” OK, four of you got that; the rest are praying I use visuals. Sorry.)
Long story short: “The Commander” don’t know much about me, but Tim sure does, and for now, that’s the way it’s gonna stay. I like writing for the rest of you; I’m assuming you like reading it. But it’s a different tpye of relationship. But don’t feel bad. It’s not you; it’s me. Just not quite ready for that level of intimacy just yet. Give me time. Give me some space. Maybe by prom, we’ll have worked it out.
There you have it: an entire essay on why writing about blogs is pointless. Irony, baby. It ain’t just a river in Egypt. Or something like that.