yourself, but sometimes even with the best of efforts you can’t avoid it. And then you have to take heed, like it or not.
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The thing I said a day or two ago about writing was, as usual incomplete. Here’s the rest: the reason that sounded hollow, and the reason this never sounds like a real blog, is not simply because I tend to do a lousy job of expressing myself (though sometimes I do).
Usually, in fact, I’m not bad at expressing myself, especially in writing.
No, the reason that sounded hollow, like so many other things posted here, is that I left almost every detail of importance out. I always leave almost every detail of importance out when I post here. On this blog my thoughts become mere shadows of their former selves, obtuse, unfocused, abstract ideas writhing and twisting in the midst of a kind of torture.
They have been stripped of their souls in order to protect the guilty. That is to say, I leave out the specifics. I leave out the details. I don’t just change the names with would-be innocents in mind, I strip the story of characters altogether and simply present the moral rather than the morality tale.
Not only does such writing lack a climax, it also tends to be deadly, deadly dry.
But if I said just one completely honest thing here, I’d lose somebody. Adult life—my life, at least—seems to be an exercise in lies and hypocrisy, despite the fact that so many people say I have so much integrity. In fact, I have very little of the stuff and most people have almost none.
If I did have it, I’d post a complete thought for once.
Instead, though every post here begins as 50 percent nouns (many of them proper), 15 percent verbs (many of them active and strong), and 35 percent adjectives (many of them colorful), by the time it goes online it has become 10 percent nouns (all of them general), 10 percent verbs (all of them passive or ambiguous), 10 percent adjectives (none of them colorful), and 70 percent conjunctions, articles, and prepositions to help the entire body of words more deftly dance around the issue, whatever it happens to be.
There is no “so-and-so is a liar” and “so-and-so is a dirty rotten cheat,” no “so-and-so has pissed me off and I wish their arms would fall into the gutter and their head accidentally into a meat-grinder,” and no “I have committed the sins of murder, theft, and genius, and for this tonight I must pay with my sobriety and self-respect!”
Instead… platitudes. Attitudes. Nonsense.
Anything I have ever wanted to post here would have cost me someone or something dear should anyone actually have read it, and as an adult (remember me using that word earlier?) I intrinsically tend toward the conservative, see the end of my own life rushing up toward me over the bonnet of my tomorrows and want to protect what I’ve got. So nothing here has actually been as I’ve meant it in years.
I’m not honest here. That’s what led me to question the project of blogging. If I can’t be honest, what’s the use? And where, pray, might any therapy—or true productivity—lie?
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As an aside, that may be why I like academic writing so much these days. I can actually write what I really think about something and have someone else read it (and appreciate it!) without committing any serious errors of omission or of anything else—and all while gaining rather than losing or at the very least being afraid of losing, much less with the need for lots of explanation or damage control.
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I think that’s the thing I’m least fond of when it comes to blogging. Even pulling my punches as I do, saying 1 percent of what I feel and letting the other 99 percent go unsaid (despite the fact that it’s for the other 99 percent that I sought to blog in the first place), I routinely end up doing damage control with someone in my life after a post, even when my posts are as generic as they are.
It’s just so much work for so little reward, it’s astonishing. And yet here is yet another post, despite everything. See what I mean? Hypocrisy! Mindless chatter! Absurdism!
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Aside: In the land of technology, a blue orchid is a machine.