Today someone posted my blog address, blatantly connected to my name, in a public-er place than this. And as a result, a good 12 people looked at this blog. That’s more people than Russian spam bots in today’s counts! Yikes.
Most likely, since this here blog is almost unsurpassed in its deliberate dullness and banality, these people will not visit again. But it still makes me want to talk about the what and the why of this thing I’m doing. Or things, if we want to drag arty blog into it.
It’s about nakedness. Disclosure. Transparency. Privacy, and the public realm.
And it’s kind of about facebook.
I’m an intensely private person. Best one-on-one, somewhere quiet and preferably dark, making my move after a year or so of idly sidling by, gauging an acquaintance’s potential through sidelong glances and offhand jokes. I don’t like to be looked at too directly, and am always surprised that I can actually be seen. But I live for the moments of disclosure, and the value of my life has always been weighed in trust earned from the people closest to me. Where I excel is in listening. Watching. Noticing. Hearing.
I don’t get a chance to do that anymore.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, in a largely pre-internet world that seems so incredibly far away, I had astoundingly strong friendships. We traveled in a pack, a tumble-cluster of bodies with hearts shared among us, sleeping and eating and playing in what re-imagined Max would declare “a real pile.” And then we grew up, as people do, and life happened, as it so often does. And now we see each other on facebook. And it’s godawful. All that declaiming. If you’re not shouting at the top of your lungs, you’re invisible, lost in the shuffle of youtube videos and funny pictures from George Takei, political admonishments and assorted drivel. Or you’re talking to yourself in a room full of “friends” you can’t see, all of them with their backs turned, none of them able to hear you over the clatter of entertainments.
I find that now that I’m a grownup (chronologically, at least – everything written here would suggest otherwise), I don’t know how to connect to people. I don’t know where the seams are in their worlds that, with a little pressure, will pry apart and reveal their chewy nougat centers. I know how to exert pressure over time, how to connect with people simmering in the pot of a shared enterprise, building sets or crewing a show or running a company or otherwise coexisting at odd times, for sustained periods, with no distractions and lots of work to do. But in social situations? People slide off me like jelly off glass. Casual conversation is my kryptonite, but I’m a pretty good person to call if someone you know gets murdered and you need a person to help you keep standing up.
“What was the worst thing you’ve ever done?” I used to ask, forcing intimacy in a dark room. Let’s cut the bullshit, in other words. Tell me who you really are. And they would. Disclosure, in private.
It didn’t always work, and I didn’t always choose the right people. It backfired. I wrote a series of confessional letters to a popular kid in high school, banking on the idea that at heart, everyone is interested in genuinely getting to know another person. That turned out not to be the case, as I learned when those letters, torn up, screwed into angry helixes, turned up in bits and pieces all over the mailroom floor.
I didn’t stop, though. I’m kind of a masochist that way.
Which brings us, maybe, to today. I’m interested and confused by this place we live in, this city of so many friggin people coexisting, zealously upholding the tacit boundaries that create public privacy. Every one with a different experience of the places we walk through, with different daily tradeoffs between the things they do, and the things they don’t. No way for passers-by to see any of it.
We are the change we wish to see in the world. Right? So somehow I’ve become an exhibitionist. Chalking messages on the sidewalk for people who don’t even see them, or for the people who see me doing it and stare, mouths open, at the words falling out of my fingers. Recording for posterity the minutia of my days, things I would never share with co-workers and acquaintances: the things I did, and the things I didn’t. The shameful and the proud, the successes and failures, the moments of perseverance and the moments where I just give up. (Is there anything more relieving than quitting?) If facebook is a room full of my friends all ignoring me, what I’m doing now is – what?
Talking to strangers from a dark place, hoping that someday, one of you will talk back.
December 5, 2011
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