Proverbs 21, Verse 2
"We can justify our every deed,
but God looks at our motives."
---
CHIPPED WISDOM:
So, I guess you're just not enough for me anymore.
Looks like my appetite is just too ravenous for only you to satisfy me they way I need to be. There is a fire within. There is a coal in the ember. There is a pussball in the fistula.
(Sorry, that was disgusting-- hope you weren't eating.)
I'm doing something I haven't done since 2008, and I am horrified to fully comprehend just how long ago that was. I joined a blogging network.
Well, I haven't fully joined yet. My "membership", such as it is, is pending. It's been nearly 24 hours since I signed up. I don't get it-- why the drama? Are they scrutinizing me to make sure I have the necessary elan to stand beside the multitude of people writing about baking a different cupcake recipe every day for a year, or the freckle-shouldered English majors writing odes to Plath? No. They're more shrewd than that, these blogging network... people. They're probably running my credit report right now, and examining my DNA on the ceiling at some shady motel under one of those "Dateline" black-lights. Let them look-- whatever sordidly pusillanimous and shamefully wicked deeds and words and thoughts they might want to uncover are all here anyway.
Well, mostly here.
I don't know why, on the one hand, I was so reluctant to join a blogging network. I joined twentysomethingbloggers.com when I was, you know, a twentysomethingblogger, and I got a fair amount of readers out of it, and a couple friends (YES SOME OF MY FRIENDS CAME FROM TWENTYSOMETHINGBLOGGERS AND MY WIFE CAME FROM JDATE GET AND I CAME FROM OCDJEW.COM SO GET OVER IT) as well.
But when I turned thirty, I checked out thirtysomethingbloggers and it was a haven for prescription drug and erectile dysfunction spam, which doesn't say many good things about thirtysomethings, but, needless to say, I was a little turned off. So I bought some little blue pills from Canada and abandoned ship.
Nearly four years later, my little blue pills all well gone and my first blog suffering from a dysfunction all of its own, I began thinking about reaching a wider audience. Why? I mean, come on, people-- just LOOK at this blog: why should you get to keep ALL THE GENIUS to yourselves? I suppose, of course, my "need" to be part of something larger, to gather more wide-eyed innocents at my knee for story time, speaks to the undeniable narcissism inherent in writing. We like to pretend that it's this solitary pursuit, just a socially awkward, bespectacled guy in a t-shirt and corduroys listening to Maritime music on headphones while his children snore away in cribbies next door-- but that's just one part of it. Then there's the part where we hit "Publish."
Publish (said derisively) It should be "Send." What I do is "publishing" the way what Nicholas Cage does is "acting." My mother kindly informed me on Sunday, while we were playing around with my children on her catfish vomit-hued living room carpet, that two of my former classmates had recently published successful books. I knew about it, but it isn't real unless you hear it from somebody else. You know, like your mother.
"I know, Ma."
"They got great write-ups in the Inquirer!" she announced.
"Honey," I said to my daughter who was jumping up and down on the rug in ecstacy, "would you please kill your grandmother for Daddy?"
She looked at me and laughed hysterically. My daughter, that is. My mother gave me a deadpan that could have slain Harvey Korman in his wingtips.
So maybe that's what it is-- jealousy, wanting to be in a larger pool, a hunger for a more impactful twice a week jaunt into the writerly world. Even if it's more Send than Publish. But I think, of course, that it's about more than that. It's about wanting some more connections. To know that what I'm doing and saying is reaching people, people I know, people I don't know-- I don't really care who it is. Because, as hermit-like and as quiet and as solitary as I can be and often want to be, there's that part of me, that small but very pungent part of me that wants to know you're there.
And, if you've got a hot sister-- she can come too.
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