blogging about my blog

So now I'm putting labels on posts. And in the process I am backreading myself in a more systematic way than I usually do. Something occured to me today, something that occurs to me every couple years or so.

All my posts are essentially the same.

When I was a kid I liked to keep my room messy, in part so that nobody else could find anything. A maze, whose hidden treasures were for my hands alone. When I make a new friend, it's my reflex to try and tell them my entire life story, right off the bat, just to see how they react to various things in it. A whole battery of tests, to see which mental contagions they already possess and to which they may be immune. So, too, when I keep a blog, I just dump everything out in no particular order. A smashed pinata, once full of ideas.

Never Cry Over Spilled Guts isn't just the title of my blog. It's part of my philosophy of life. My ideal would be total transparency. To be able to telepathically transmit everything I know, remember, think and feel to anyone I met who was interested. And yes, to be able to receive similar transmissions in return, if people were willing to send them. I want to be able to have total and perfect trust, or to be in such a place where I am comfortable being totally transparent even without trust.

In real life this is impracticable. For example, I can't show this blog to my mom. In posts made in the past, or even ones in the more recent present, I've said things about her which would hurt her deeply to read. Things I don't know if she would be willing to understand or forgive even with a telepathic infodump. And I couldn't have shown it to Dad, either, while he was alive. While he was alive I spent my blogtime complaining about him, and said all my nice things to his face. Now I can't say nice things to his face anymore, and the only thing I can be annoyed at him for is being dead. And I have a couple of ex-friends, or acquaintances with whom I've lost touch over the years, who would probably say I was a self-centered bastard for still coming on here and ranting about myself and my favorite random crap every day.

So with very few exceptions, I actually would want the whole world to know this much about me.

But! I have made the information much more trouble to access than it's worth by making my blog user-unfriendly. This is not just self-deprecation. I've devoted enough of my time and attention and sacred honor to various internet pursuits to know what is and is not likely to get, and keep, people's attention. This blog is the polar opposite of that. It is carefully constructed to be ugly to the eye, clunky and frustrating to navigate, and lacking in any narrative direction or topical cohesion. It is self-referential in the extreme, but without internal links, FAQ, or any other resource to guide the potentially interested passerby.

Now, why would I do this, this contradictory pattern of actions? I'm still not sure. But I have clearly been doing it for a long time, with more things than my blog, and I ought to try to understand why.

Recently I've been pondering this thought: Most people get into poetry as a way to express themselves. I got into it as a way to control myself. To impose order and structure and shape onto parts of myself I didn't recognize, trust, or like. Not much order, you understand. Just enough that I knew more or less where I was, what I was doing. Not enough to be easily explained to someone else. Not enough to turn the hedge maze into a flower garden, turn the nice-but-weirdo chick into a real cool babe who happens to know things about weird stuff.

I have to go home from work now, but I am quite sure I'll have time at work tomorrow to blog more about blogging about my blog. Or write about myself. Either way, I'll enjoy doing it. Which is as good a reason to continue as any.