I never know how personal to get in this journal. Actually, I usually write my most personal things by hand in a plain notebook at home. Recently, I’ve been writing regularly, like clockwork, but something has disrupted this… I am sick. I think I may be over the worst of it, but it might be chronic, and I’m a bit worried. Am I going to die sooner rather than later?

Its that kind of thing that I don’t feel like I can write online. What if a family member reads this and asks me about being worried about dying? What if a friend does?

Blogs are latent… wait, no, they’re not latent. They’re like dreams. You can pay attention to the messages of friends by digging, or you can blow them off, answering emails and holding things away from consciousness.

But if you choose to pay attention to someone online, you can often follow them around and find out quite a bit of their state of mind, their behavior, or their relationships. Some of us keep fairly personal things online, which should make this easier, but then again, people lie.

There’s some inverse relationship between how personal someone is in public spaces and their authenticity. This isn’t absolute, but a good rule of thumb. If you know someone, like me, who keeps a personal journal online, you can safely bet that they are aware of their being on stage. Then there are those exceptional (or naive) people who actually use a public blog as if it were perfectly private. But even these people should be taken with a big grain of theatrical salt. Its helpful to assume that “everyone knows everything” in this case, and to take public messages stated in a private manner as being exactly what they are: public messages.

In my case, I know of 3 people who might just happen across this blog on something of a regular basis, and a half dozen more who potentially would scour it for tidbits. So, I cannot pretend that its private at all. There is no gateway, unless I post it as ‘private’, but what is the point of that? I think of this kind of blog as a sort of ‘unpublished letters’ that is nonetheless, published. Its significantly boring enough to deter all but those who read things like ‘letters from so and so, after their death’, and these happen not to be the same people I worry about confronting with the content here. So it works for me, but it is something of a dangerous line.

Why not write actual letters instead? Meh. I’ve done enough of that. No, that’s not honest. I’ve not got anything I feel like ‘lettering’, would be more accurate. I don’t mind the writing to dear friends part. I enjoy it, and my letters tend to be valued by their recipients. And I do want to connect with my friends in that way. Its just that… well, I feel so disorganized, ambiguous, ambivalent. Nothing I have to say has the weight of conviction really, and I really hate to bore people with details that may just become untrue while the letter is in the mail.

So I keep my journal here as something of an ongoing letter. Who would it be too?

Dear Whitney, Jody, David, Scott, Thayer, Tom, Liz, Tess, Christopher, Victor, Soren, Jenny, Nina, Clark, Rebecca, Rose, Adam, Rachel, Nicole, Luke, Sean, Peter Oishi!, Johnny Moore, Dodson, Barry, Anya, Amy, Linda, Patrick, Peter, Pav, and so many other people…

And the problem with intimate letters to friends is that I don’t get a copy. Its really that simple. I could photocopy my letters, but I am a bum, a lazy bum.

So I’ve written a bunch of paragraphs saying precisely nothing. I think you must agree: That is a talent!

I wanted to write on the nature of meaning and human existence, as a prelude to an essay for the main blog, but alas, I’m just mired in the bullshit of my nittering mind.

I’m finally lonely and bored. It takes a lot for me to get here. I don’t bore easily (let that be testimony to me smarts), but being sick has isolated me yet further from those rare things that keep me going without facing the simple emotions of my painful and never-resolving depressive obsession, or whatever the hell it is. I can’t quite seem to get up the energy to bring this conflict to a head, yet I continually get updates on my state of being, which (though probably clear to anyone else) always befuddle me.

I was thinking about what ‘having a life with meaning means. Doesn’t this just mean ‘believing one’s own egocentric bullshit’? How could one tell the difference? And what would it be like to know that one’s life meant nothing in the bigger picture? Could this be countered with relational meaning (IE, I mean a lot to my wife and kids (if I had those)), or with situational meaning: “Such and such needs done for so and so reason, and I’m going to do that, even though in the big picture it doesn’t matter”.?

I keep coming back to the idea that I’m stuck in some emotional moment of abandonment or wounding of some kind. And though my dreams have shown me the brilliant warmth of love and presence, I have strong doubts that I will ever be able to move past this frozen moment.

The basic idea is to either go back to the moment of inception (revisit rather than relive), or to challenge the assumptions of that solidified ‘knowledge’ until the walls are broken down and the true self re-emerges. What a hunk of bullshit really. I just want to be alive, in the flow of my potential, capable of risking and losing and moving on.

Please,

UNFREEZE

-Alex