Life After the Cookie Jar

<p style=”clear: both”>I think I need to turn the comments off on my blog for a while.

I was talking about this with my friend Sarah, today. She doesn’t have comments on her personal blog, and she told me that some people don’t consider it a real blog if you don’t have comments. But then she blogs for a living on other blogs and the comments there are enough to erode one’s faith in humanity, long ad hominem arguments, people getting entrenched in their own positions and so on.

That of course of has never happened on my blog. My readers, both of you, are much too civilized for that. In fact, the joy of blogging has been the thoughtful comment, the delicious conversation. So turning off comments feels perverse and self-sabotaging even by my own crazy standards.

I’ve missed my blog. Even with the regular journal writing I miss the spot to have my thoughts composed and set out and polished a little, presented. But when Sarah generously gave me a shout-out on UrbanMamas it made me freeze up. People were looking at my blog. They were going to be expecting something.

Which is why, right now, I kind of have to close the door and pretend you’re not there. I am haunted by the image from Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead, that reader and text and writer form this triangle, and there is no connecting writer and reader only the connection that each has with the words. And when my brain gets all abuzz with the droning of little envy bees and competition bees and the crowded field and the feeling of my own voice lost in the crowded hive, the only redemption I have found is to retreat to the private world of words.

In college I was dating a guy who adored Alice Walker and got tickets to go hear her read and afterwards dragged me to stand in line to get an autograph and it was utterly disconcerting after the deep intimacy of having her poems in my head to be standing face to face, flesh to flesh with this very real human being who didn’t know me from Adam.

I think also of Salinger. Who lives in my head as loudly as any writer does. And was the first writer with whom I had to experience the weird relinquishment of understanding that other people had a claim to him just as I did, that the girl I thought the biggest phony in high school was as busy relating to Holden as I was, and how strange a jealousy that was! And that I interpret (though of course your are free to otherwise) his reclusiveness as an attempt to be a real person rather than succumb to the dangers of believing in the hype. And that there is an odd redemptive experience of being grateful that that private experience of me as a reader alone with his books is not even one I can be jealous over, it simply is.

And finally, I think of privacy. Not as in the keeping of my secrets, my family’s secrets, but what it is to be public versus private. That on my worst days Facebook is redubbed Jelusbook because it is where I can go for tangible, objective evidence that everyone has more friends than I do, that the the friends I have prefer their other friends to me, that there is something just lacerating about every act of friendship becoming a public act. That if I pitch my voice differently with my children when I catch someone listening to us, especially when someone smiles appreciatively at something particularly adorable Rainer has said, something fabulously witty Aodán has said, some deep observation Xander has made, some incredibly thoughtful Søren has done, then how can my behavior to my friends not change with the apprehension of audience?

I love the internet. I am always dismayed at how quickly the conversation becomes this over-simplistic reductive internet good vs. internet bad one, but I still wrestle for a healthy relationship to it. I love the worlds of inexhaustible information available at my fingertips, and have found wonderful and deep friendships that are independent of geography. But the friendships, once formed, deserve a degree of privacy.

So, I will try to get the backlog of thoughts I have that I have wanted to polish and articulate and layout slowly queuing onto the blog (or, for how backlogged I feel, I want to spell it queueueueueing). But for now, if you feel compelled to talk to me about it? I’d really love an email. And of course, I reserve the right to change my mind.