I emerged from Monday's pitiful sinkhole of jealousy feeling drained but ready to try again. I must need to confront my deepest failings in order to push beyond them or some damn thing. It's not very dignified but when the fit comes upon me there is no recourse but to admit it. The only good thing about those snits is they're never directed at specific people, just certain situations. At any rate, it worked. By yesterday I was reinvigorated and determined to try some new things as well as acting on some previous invitations to write for online magazines. When I think of how rarely I succumb to emotional extremes these days I'm awfully impressed, not to mention grateful to have found respite from the intensity of earlier years. All without drugs, too. Not that there's anything wrong with taking drugs to control chemical imbalances, as Jerry Seinfeld would say. I'm just glad I don't have to be on meds in order to lead a normal life. Okay, maybe I can't claim normalcy, but a heck of a lot more relaxed than I ever thought I'd be happy with. Sturm und drang wears me out, baby, and I've no love of a complicated, high maintenance lifestyle.
I was talking about that last night with Spike and Tom and John over beers and garlic fries at Gordon Biersch. I mentioned being disappointed over how inaccurate my web counter was, and how it had become a minor obsession with me to check it constantly even though I knew it was not an exact record of how many people looked at my web pages. Tom was amiably badgering me about having a counter, wondering why I bothered, what made me think it gave any kind of useful information, since it didn't tell me the quality of person who read my pages. Then he wanted to know why I cared who read me. There's only one answer to that, of course. I don't care who reads me. I hope it's a group of interesting, intelligent, fully socialized adults but I'll never know that for sure.
It reminded me of how futile and pathetic I think it is to make a statement on your online journal index page that you don't want anyone you know to read your diary so go away if they know you. I just can't imagine why anyone thinks this would work. It's a public forum, the Internet. You can't publish your work there without some kind of password-protection set up and still control who looks at it. It's not only a silly request under the circumstances, and impossible to enforce, but you haven't got a leg to stand on in terms of artistic control. In fact, it practically reads like an invitation to find out what secrets may be revealed. So why do people do it? Fence-sitting always did drive me crazy.
Anyway, I defended my love of web counters as a method of gauging how successful the diary was in gaining and keeping readership, despite lack of pinpoint accuracy, and laughed at the idea of being sure only certain people read it. I can't possibly predict who will find my quiet, dry humour amusing or who will become caught up in the mild ups and downs of my life. The sturm und drang in Aries Moon is all past tense, you see. I had a tense, troubled childhood with a traumatizing adolescence even though no one did anything so vile as to abuse me. The wrong environment can do a great deal of damage even with the best intentions in the world; you don't try to grow cactus in the Arctic, after all. I came out of it defensive, scared of other people, easily embarrassed, and very high maintenance. A complex emotional reality made for constant drama and it was clear to me I didn't communicate with others very well. I wanted the world to be black and white. Shades of grey seemed like a betrayal, a personal insult.
I got over it eventually. Now I think those shades of grey work in my favor. A little time, a little experience, a little therapy, a lot of false starts and alarums, all part of learning when to compromise and when to stick my neck out. I swear the worst part about growing up was learning how unfair life is. I should so much like for fairness to be the ideal, the strong to protect the weak, good to triumph over evil, honesty and decency to be universal. It is my burden to believe in these things. It is my goal to strive towards them. It is my faith that they matter.
Keeping a self-centered, lightweight online diary might not seem like much in the way of a battle cry for truth and justice, but when my voice rises above the murmur of the crowd long enough to be heard then I feel I've done something useful with my life. Expressing myself with artistry and grace is a pleasurable way of reaching out beyond the daily grind. Communication with the audience. The urge to touch someone else. The need to tell my story, to add it to the collective memory. That's why it doesn't matter to me who reads this. Just as long as it gets read.
And that's why I keep a counter. To remind myself that someone out there is reading.
