You know, when I initially began my first blog, I had hoped that its Incredible Cleverness would outsmart any criticism in advance.  It was all very meta, and if any of you hapless enough to click on that link are able to parse what the heck I was trying to do, big ups to you; half of the time I forgot what I was doing.  My many alter egos were meant to have their own ability to comment and fight amongst themselves, and theoretically even without the benefit of actual real-life readers my internal battles would be fought on these here Interducts for all to see.

Unsurprisingly, my drive to log these battles has waned considerably.  I mean, really. There are some funny bits, and I’m not saying I don’t still believe and think all of the bits that are on there now; I just don’t want to have to hide from my own words with all these little nods and winks and injokes.

Maybe it’s because my favourite author recently took his own life. I have been rereading all of my favourites and my heart has been so heavy, missing the potentiality of his voice.  He made the decision that he thought was right, and I realize it’s idle [also irrelevant] to debate this choice or speculate about his reasons.  I just don’t want to be silenced before I’ve even spoken, if you know what I mean.  He often wrote about being the critic of one’s own material, even before it was out of cranial-embryo, before it was ever typed or [God forbid] read.  That idea has stopped me from writing so many times it’s pretty embarrassing, and as a tribute to his impact on my creativity and my inner world I’m just going to go ahead and let it all hang out.

He would probably say, now that I mention it, that this is a classic technique to end-run potential criticism:  to actually say out loud that you realized that naïvite was the last great Millenial sin but that you literally were driven, DRIVEN I say, with pointy sticks and irate villagers, to disclose the incredibly dramatic and pathos-filled genesis of this particular weblog, and therefore undercut those smallsouled Philistines who are waiting to mark this paragraph as a run-on sentence and not a very good one besides.

Sometimes you have to be willing to look like a little bald-headed fat-legged baby to do what you believe is right.

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