Nothing

Apparently I can't make this an invitation blog since it isn't housed on Blogger. It's on my ISP server. So it just hangs out here.

I'm not really worried. Goatman is so self absorbed I don't think he bothers searching for anything but his name.

He wrote an apology blog the other day in which he denies that what he wrote about a fellow blogger was really about her. It was all a great big misunderstanding. And the Buffalo Turd chimes in that it is terrible to be misunderstood. And some other twit says he is a big man for admiting his mistake.

Give me a fucking break. He is so full of shit that if you squeezed his head you'd have brown stains all over the ceiling.

Oh well. He has to live with himself.

Group think

One of the things I find disturbing about blog comments at times is the pig pile aspect of them. People pile on with "me too" sentiments and become outraged at dissenting viewpoints. Then they become piranha attacks and each one takes a bite out of the person who dared stand up and say something different.

Or if you try to do something different it sets off ripples in the blog pond. Take for instance becoming an "invitation only" blog. I've already seen comments popping up on the blogosphere about a certain "favorite blog" that has dared to limit access. There are hurt feelings. I wonder how long it will take before those hurt feelings are replaced with anger.

All of this because we try to express ourselves and protect ourselves. We are either too exclusive or too inclusive. We are too liberal or too conservative. We are too opinionated or too wishy washy.

Yesterday I wrote a post about whacked out crack heads. I half expected someone to tell me it wasn't very sensitive to call someone with a substance abuse problem a whacked out crackhead. That would have happened if I had dared write that in my work world. And I would have had to respond with an apology and say I did not intend it as a negative term, but a descriptive term. I am becoming more draconian in my blog world. If someone had said the term was offensive I would have thanked them for their comment and then suggest they go fuck themselves.

I'm tired of offending people unintentionally. I'd rather just be honest and offend them intentionally.

I'm beginning to view this blog as my pressure valve place. I can come here and scream. I can spout like a tourette's victim on speed. And it doesn't matter. There is something very comforting about that.

Uplifting

One of the difficult things about writing a "public" blog that has a modest number of people who read it and comment on it is this feeling like you have to write crap that is optimistic and uplifting. I suppose it is a self-imposed cross to bear.

I really do believe that you need to write for yourself and not care what anyone else thinks. This is not about pleasing people. It is not about accumulating readers or being discovered or popular. I do think blogging is about self-discovery.

But the funny thing about self-discovery is that you don't always discover good things. My whole experience being part of that terrible group blog experience triggered something in me I didn't expect. Although in real life I shrink from the limelight, in the blog world I discovered I don't like sharing it. I don't like playing by other people's rules and conforming to community standards. Hell, I have to do that in the real world. Why the hell would I want to start playing that game in the virtual one.

I don't deal with criticism well. I internalize it. But first I strike out and try to turn the tables on the ones criticizing me. That's what happened on that stupid blog.

I suppose the virtual world is a better place for this to happen than in the real, civilized one. Though in my work world, I have the reputation of someone who speaks his mind and can be blunt, I still know limits. You have to when you livelyhood depends upon it. The blog world really doesn't have those limits. But people always try to impose them.

I think of this world as an amazing experiment. It is not for everyone. That, I think is why there is a high incidence of blogger breakdowns. And though I have toyed with quitting at times, I keep going.

Sometimes I just think I can't stop.

Purpose

Sometimes I wonder if the reason people turn to religion is to be able find a surrogate purpose in their lives. If you believe in a god you can say things happen because "it is god's will." It's a great crutch if you are a loss for finding purpose on your own.

I don't want to write about how I feel in my other blog. I don't want to write about despair or depression or lack of meaning. I can read about that in enough other blogs. And I don't want advice from well meaning strangers.

One of the things that used to piss me off when the warlock BDSM goat herder would leave comments on my blog was that it was always something about him. I wanted to respond, "Fuck you. This is my blog. Go whine about your unhappy childhood in your own pitiful blog. I can't help it you suffer from short man syndrome." But no, I'd always be polite. I was always raised to be polite, even to assholes.

Oddly enough, I am not looking for anyone to comfort me. I gave up believing anyone could comfort me after hundreds of dollars of therapy bills and anti-depressants. And to think that one time in my life I thought I wanted to be a psychologist. How depressing would that have been. Sitting around nodding and looking sympathetic when all you want to do is slap the person and say, "you are pitiful."

It always bugged me to pay someone to listen to me. It seemed too much like paying a prostitute. At least a prostitute would be honest about screwing you. It also bugged me how they'd stop you mid crisis when your time was up and usher you out the door like a one-night stand they'd woken up next to.

Obviously I have issues about therapists. Perhaps I need to see a therapist about it. Ha, ha.

What am I looking for? Purpose. I want a reason to be. I want to matter. I used to think being a published writer would mean I mattered. I wanted my words to change people's lives. Maybe it is an ego thing. Or maybe it is just human nature.

We are raised to think we are special and then we go out into the world and discover everyone thinks they are special and other people are ordinary. And when you stand in line at Starbucks and the 20-something cashier chats up the Amazon.com goth geek for 15 minutes while you wait patiently to order your grande Americano with room, you realize that you really aren't special. You are invisible, especially to the 20-somethings.

But suppose it is god's will.

A bit lost

My 49th birthday is creeping up on me. I have never really liked my birthay. This is a common thread for me. It never lives up to expectations. Part of it is that it reminds me that I have very few friends. But I have very few friends by choice. I find it much easier to interact internally than expend the energy to interact externally.

I despise small talk. I hate chatter. People who cannot sit without going on mindlessly annoy me. Sometimes I feel bad for having these feelings. Sometimes people blather on because they are lonely. My mother for instance. I'm sure her obsession with narratives on grocery shopping and lunch menus stems from spending so much time alone with her dog.

I am terrified at times of becoming like the people who annoy me. Is it karma though? Will all of those times I've been impatient with some old person plodding along in front of me at the grocery store come back to haunt me as I get older? Will I be that boring old man annoying people with repetitious stories?

I catch myself repeating myself in my blog and I cringe. It is one thing to be repetitous on purpose for comic effect. It is another to repeat yourself because you forgot saying it before.

I still lose sight at times of the point of blogging. It has become habitual for me, part of my obsessive behaviour. It's like a twitch anymore. I suppose it comes across as that at times. My mental farts.

I find it difficult to blog when I'm on vacation or at a conference. Maybe it proves that the blog is my stress relief during my normal day. We had so much going on in Guatemala that I didn't feel the same compulsion to write. Plus I've always hesitated to write too much about my personal life in my blog. At least overtly about my personal life.

It startles me at times to witness blog breakdowns. Most of them are cryptic crys in the virtual ether. Funny how some commentors flock to these crys like predators swarming a wounded animal. I still find it awkward to comment when some one has a meltdown. My urge is to be a smart ass. And the last thing someone in crisis needs is a smart ass. So most of the time I just don't comment.

Maybe it embarrasses me. I want my meltdowns to be in private. I still believe in muffling the screams.

Rub some dirt in it. Shake it off.

The blog zone is for loading and unloading only.

Men and women

I watched a segment on a news magazine the other night about a woman who posed as a man for 18 months and wrote a book about her experience in the man's world. She was a lesbian who looked a lot like KD Lang to begin with so the transition wasn't as big as a stretch as one would think.

One of the first things she did was join a men's bowling team. Like this is the last bastion of masculinity that would unlock the door to the men's club.

There is something seriously fucked up about this approach to trying to understand the difference between what it is like to be a man and a woman. First dressing like the other gender and pretending to me them will not give you insight in what is like to be the other gender. You may find out how the other gender is treated but that will not let you into that "secret" world of men and women.

I don't think it exists.

What separates each of us is the life and experience we have compiled. Sure, gender is part of it, but just being a man doesn't make me understand all men. And I'm willing to bet that just being a woman doesn't make a woman privy to what makes women tick.

I don't claim to understand anyone. I'm just barely figuring out myself. I live with my wife. I talk to her and I listen to her. But I don't claim to really have any insights into that separate world we both live in. I think we are closer than most and can intuit certain things, but I believe fundamentally all people are mysteries to each other.

And that is not necessarily a bad thing.

I would never want anyone to read my mind. Could you imagine how we would recoil at the the secret thoughts people think? None of us could ever look each other in the eye if we really knew what we thought down in the recesses of our minds.

I don't believe, however, that men and women have to be in separate camps trying to figure out what each other are all about. That seems to polarize our differences rather than bridges them. Maybe I believe this because I am older and no longer driven by hormones that emphasized the difference between men and women. Or maybe it is because I've always had as many or more women friends than I had guy friends.

I do know that I have no desire to embrace my masculinity by beating a freakin drum while dancing around a fire. And I don't want to wear my testicles around my neck in a leather pouch as attonement for my gender's sins against humanity.

Can't we all just get along?

Confessionals

One of the relatively new bloggers I read wrote a post yesterday about starting out to write a journal of sorts and then being intimidated when people started commenting. She complained of no longer feeling free to write honestly for fear of how her readers might take things. She was at a fork in the road and didn't know whether to delete the blog or try and just write honestly.

This person had been sharing pretty intimate information about her struggle to get pregnant for quite some time. Last week she wrote of another ultrasound where they could see the 6 1/2 week old fetus but couldn't hear a heartbeat. She wrote of her doctor's warning that they needed test again in a week and if the pregnancy was healthy, they'd hear a heartbeat. If not it ment there was no longer a pregnancy.

Then today she posted that she'd had an ultrasound and discovered that she was no longer pregnant.

And the commentors...including Buffalo dung...one after one wrote platitudes about being sorry.

I couldn't comment. What could I say? I barely know this person yet I had just read something brutely personal about her. I am hurt for her and know she must be devastated yet I feel it would almost cheapen the confession for me to say something meaningless.

When she wrote that she was no longer pregnant, I wanted to scream that no...no, that wasn't the way to write this script. We all wanted hear that her months of trying to get pregnant had been worth it and that she was carrying a healthy baby. That wasn't the way things were supposed to work out.

This is the downside of writing about your personal life in a blog. It's like letting strangers rummage through your underwear drawer or medicine cabinet. How do I process this information? Do I treat it like those people I see on the news? Strangers suffering misfortunes. I can tsk, tsk and move on because I really don't know them.

But blogging forces you to be more involved. You are strangers, but not strangers. You care, but you aren't really part of each other's lives.

Are you?