October 07, 2005

A wonderful stranger with the best name in the world asked me the other day why I do the things I do. Why do I make my life so public? Aren’t I worried people will misunderstand? And if I worry, why do I write this crazy shit anyways? Just what am I trying to prove?

And I said, that’s a lot of questions and I don’t have any answers. I can only tell you that there is a good way and a bad way of writing about personal stuff. The bad way reads like a shitty poem — it’s angsty and nobody wants to read it. The good way is honest, simple and interesting both to you and your readers. If you make things interesting, nobody can possibly get angry with you. Unless you’re being a big jerk.

Besides, I trust my readers — they are wonderful and crazy-smart. So smart that they can sense depth and emotion, and they always surprise me with their tenderness. Then I started to lie, like I usually do. I told her that I don’t agonize about what I write, that it’s hard to write good shit if you worry about how it’s going to be read.

And I told her that words are everything — that’s why we have to keep pouring our thoughts into machines. Some words are happy, others are sad, but unless we speak we experience neither joy nor pain. Everything that is has to be invoked through language. Sometimes, I’m such a fucking English major I even disgust myself. But this part is true — unless we write things down we forget how lovely and sad everything is. Blogging gives some permanence, some meaning.

So I told her to write often, and for god’s sake not to follow any of that goddamn awful advice on blogging.