Never a cop around...

(Note: This was roughly what I was writing about when my browser froze and I lost my words, leading me, in a fit of whining stupidity spliced with childish rage, to introduce a fat crack into my nice wooden chair. Unfortunately, it loses the essence, the original on-the-fly creative riff energy I had the first go-around...energy so precious, I guess, that I guess it can lead to broken furniture. I don't know why I'm re-writing it…maybe to explore the process of re-writing. Maybe this is something to do because I can't look my wife in the eye right now. Under my own orders, I need to be isolated for a while until this taint reaches some sort of half-life and I can go back to our bed again.)

I'm looking around for a blog feedback function for my blog, and I'm coming up empty. Frustrating this is because when i go tromping around and reading blogs for fun, I trip over so many sites with neat talkback functions that I want to incorporate. I'm tired of waiting for Blogger to make one, so I wanted to take the code into my own hands. Trouble is, when I look for a feedback function, I'm trounced at every turn, standing alone in a ballroom and staring at the walls for hints.

In the meantime, I've been doing a lot of spelunking into other blogs hosted by Blogger. So far tonight, I've found online diaries documenting the life of a waitress from Georgia, a girl starting school and having trouble with tennis and violin classes, and a Goth woman who is in this incredibly sexually intense relationship with a man she hardly knows. It's a toss of the dice what you'll get, because Blogger's "Most Recently Updated Blogs" section changes by the second with thousands of writers all over the world adding new prose to their pages constantly. It's an army of mostly youth, computer-savvy writers who are making a dent in the porn-saturated Internet with stories of their own adventures that's both trite and exciting, depending on when you hit the "refresh' button at the top of your browser. Voluntarily, people you've never met have poured out their lives onto electrons and PHP code and slapped it up for the whole world to see. Strange. I imagine these writers would be terrified if someone copied pages from their diaries and posted them in the school hallways.

Maybe it works this way: since the Web itself is so large, there's very little chance in you ever meeting the person who is posting their deepest thoughts, so they are less restrained in their writing. You rarely get first names on the blogs, which could lead to the openness. I certainly don't have my personal e-mail address attached to this site. No, this is the place where I divorce myself from the form I'm in when out in public. This is the place where I'm mostly honest and open with my live, with my thoughts. Only a few people know who I am, and I'm keeping it that way. This place is the release, the place to open up...a less severe version of the Hyde personality, a commentary itself on the socially repressive Victorian society, the locale and time when the story was written.

And this march of openness, casual and freely done by bloggers all over the world, gives a glimpse into lives not normally seen, but appreciated at a distance. I haven't begun bookmarking the certain blogs i like yet, but when I do, I shall go back on a daily basis to see their lives progress, no matter if it's about dating, the daily grind of a service industry gig or how geometry class is going.

Is it really voyeurism when the subject openly displays him/herself?

For my part, I do add to the pot, being honest about things I do and reactions I have. Mostly, I find myself hiding behind links to odd stories I find on the Web. Sometimes, I get into a longer piece (something that this is turning out to be), typically something a lot more personal.

Today, I did a lot of e-mailing back and forth with my poet friend Cori, who I mentioned a few posts back, is going for a newspaper job in Idaho, a job that sounds like a hellish work-til-you-drop, cover-ten-beats-at-once grind that gave us both heart conditions at the paper we worked at together a few years ago. Note: she ended up leaving and I put in for a promotion to be the Opinion/Wire editor, a job a soon got.

She's not sure about the job, but she doesn't know what to do. Jobs are scarce for writing-types like her (she got her master's in writing earlier this year) and she's running low on cash. She's hinted at returning to school (she lives scant blocks from the University of Idaho), so I helped her by looking up course information on the Web because the computer she's using now is a bit grumpy when trying to download Acrobat Reader, which is needed to view the UI catalog. We also went over old times at the paper we were at, as well as me being a reference for her. Wow...so grown-up of me.

So, because she played a part in my day's events, I'm likely to write about her. I'm trying to take this casually, but I end up staring intently at the blog window, sweating bullets, like I'm doing microsurgery. It shouldn't be that hard...it should just “be,” to grossly use a Zen term. But there's this weird "fair use" policy I have in my head, thinking I should ask people if I could borrow a snip of their lives to be fodder for my site, but I figure it's all okay as long as I'm not trashing them. This is, until I get the feedback system working, a one-way street with me in charge of the road. A cold part of me equates this blog to that old Star Trek episode where two societies are at war, via a computer simulation, and anyone or anything in the zone of war is a fair target. There are standards I’ve put in place. There are things I will talk about in my life and things that will remain offline.

I suppose I'm just caught in the vastness of the concept of the blog, staring out into the open, blank blogspace, trying to get my mind around it but I can't. I can't tame what blogspace is, can't compress it into a simple species or device. To me, it's the Internet all over again, with people crafting Webspaces to display whatever they desired in some kind of surreal gallery which burst with new ideas, new ways to show off text and sound. Blogs have made it easier, albeit in a cookie-cutter fashion. But I've been playing with my blog template, altering colors and changing the font on the blogtitle. Sure, it's not crafting HTML from scratch, but I've done my time in the sulfur mines of Web design. I prefer the template method these days; I'm more interesting in brewing up the content and will happily leave the infrastructure in the hands of someone else for a while. After all, writers don't actually print their books. Companies do that, and writers are freed up to fret about deadlines and writer's block.

I want to get this right, whatever right is. I want to make this blog something more electric than posting links, but sometimes I have to go short and pop some link to a news source on here because I'm so driven to come up with something new, original, alive, shocking, clever, human, perplexing, touching, coy, smooth, surgical, clean, robust and whatever other adjectives that like to play around in my literary desires. It's almost torture to be a writer and have a blog, facing a blank page and instant audience...all the while hearing a silent goading to be something worthy of attention without being...I don't know...cheap and sensational.

This is some kind of proving ground, I think...a desert to wander in to purify my thoughts, to amplify my desires, to see what will stick and what looks good when you pluck it from a brain and slap it to some reading medium. Like much of life, this place is a work in progress, and I hope you, whomever you are, get something out of this. I never realized how hard it is just to write about your life. No wonder memoirs take years to complete. Everyone has a life story, why should they read someone else's...unless the writer has got something to say and some interesting way to say it.

So, stay tuned to this little reality show on this tiny end of the Internet and keep hitting the "Refresh" button. Maybe something interesting will happen when you least expect it.

P.S. I did find someplace offering a blog feedback feature worth checking out...some site called Haloscan. Will keep you posted.