I'm not an early adopter. I don't have an iPhone or an iPad. I own a cellphone that I use for the rather antiquated purpose of sending and receiving phone calls. I'm 43 years old, behind the times, and life has beaten the ego out of me.
So the notion of creating a blog strikes me as completely absurd. It feels like a technology abused by narcissists, mental masturbation fueled by some sort of Beat fantasy that one's auto-writing is not only fascinating but culturally significant.
But maybe a blog is just right for a guy like me. I'm alone, somewhat by choice, somewhat by circumstance. I am in a vacuum. I haven't been this alone since my early twenties. And how did I deal with the loneliness twenty years ago? I wrote. Journal page after journal page I wrote, for no other reason than to be talking to someone, to feel connected even if it was to no more than notes and doodles on a sketchbook page.
My preference was to sit for hours in a coffee shop on the corner of La Brea and Beverly, I think, in Los Angeles. I'd drink cup after cup of mint tea, all the while scribbling furiously in a black, bound sketchbook. It accomplished nothing, but at least I was somehow integrated into the world.
And even though I still had enough ego at that age to secretly hope that I was creating a journal of Nin-like significance, I was horrified at the notion of someone actually reading the thing. In fact, one strange evening Peter Max grabbed for my journal-in-a-sketchbook, assuming that if The Max was near a young man's sketchbook he must be looking for feedback from the master. A tug of war ensued, and my shot at impressing Peter Max went out the window. I suppose at some point I should tell that story.
That coffee shop is a lifetime ago, and the black journals and their embarrassing contents are hidden away in the attic. So is the guy who wrote them, for that matter. But the impulse is still there - that desire to scream into the wind, knowing full well that I'm the only one who will hear it.
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