In which I begin thinking I know what I'm going to
say...only to ultimately prove myself wrong.

So my friend Mark asked me a few weeks ago just why I do this whole on-line writing thing. He seemed most interested in how I decide what to reveal and what to keep hidden when I write this stuff. While lots of folks that write on-line have a readership that has never met them, or family that doesn’t know their site exists, I have to be sensitive to the fact that what I write does affect people. I once wrote about Photogal running around the house looking cute in her underwear – a topic I though was both complimentary and a little funny – and learned that Photogal did not in fact appreciate her dressing habits around the house being discussed in a rather public forum.

When my father was dying there were moments I really wanted to go off on him but I knew he was reading my site (I didn’t know he was printing out everything I wrote and carrying it around with him though) so I bit my tongue. Other times I have thoughts that I realize may do me some good to exorcise and write about but will also probably anger or hurt people that read this site.

So that’s kind of the crux of it, I guess. The way I decide about how far to go on a particular topic is directly tied in to the effect it will have on people involved with that topic. I don’t believe I should use this forum as a means to cause other people direct harm. This of course discounts bands or things I am looking at critically. For the most part, though, I don’t think my views actually have the power to harm people. I can honestly say I’ve never written a post, read it over and then deleted it. For that reason I’m also going to say that my inner censor tends to act instinctively and keeps most things that would be “inappropriate” for this forum at bay pretty effectively.

The more I type about this, the more I think about it and the more I think maybe my opening statements in this piece are a little off. I guess I really don’t know why I choose what I write about. At its base this site is pretty egomaniacal, if you really think about it, and therefore I am probably going to be alright with whatever stems from my work here. But that is a mindset common among just about every writer (otherwise why deem your work important enough to be read by others) or any artist, really. Hell, I once self-published a bunch of my journals¹ about twelve years ago and I’ve been doing this on-line thing in one form or another for over a decade and I think it’s safe to say that both exercises were borne out of my need to trumpet my views an flex my mental muscles in a public forum. So if I’m going to work from that viewpoint than what I do or do not include becomes more of an aesthetic argument, right? So if that’s the case then my inner censor isn’t really a censor at all but instead functions as an inner critic making decisions and culling and adding as the work as a whole demands.

Hmmm…that’s a pretty big leap don’t you think? But I think it works. And I like how I went from what I thought was my motivation in simple broad terms into an arena I had never really considered but probably actually spurs most of this site’s content. So does this make me a more or less likeable writer? And should I care? I mean obviously I care that people read what I write and obviously I are that people enjoy what they’re reading but do I really care if they like the guy who writes the things they enjoy reading? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.

But at least now, thanks to Mark’s seemingly innocuous initial question, I have a better idea of why I do this in the first place.

¹For the record I think I only sold two copies of that journal and one of them was to an ex-girlfriend who just wanted to see what I wrote about her. Definitely not the smash bestseller I had been hoping for at the time.