Blogstalkers, kindly go fuck yourselves
◊ You forget when you're parked in front of the computer at 3 a.m. in a ratty bathrobe and mismatched socks, but a blog or Web diary is a very public venue. And if you mine your personal life for material, as is inevitable when your access to self-publishing and intoxicants coincide, you become a low-budget soap opera.
Friends, faraway strangers and anyone you've been dumb enough to give your URL to will tune in. And as long as you're a halfway decent writer or an unstoppable vortex of drama, they'll stay. You can decide which camp you're in � craftsman or Melrose Place � but you don't get to choose your audience.
Most people, unfamiliar with writing for an audience, write everything they think as soon as they think it on the premise that since it's their lives, they should say what thay want. It's true, it's honest, and depending on their levels of candor and site traffic, it inevitably gets them shunned, bitch-slapped, dumped or on the phone with someone who can't stop cussing or crying, or possibly both, at 3 a.m. when reasonable humans are blogging. Even the dumbest blogger eventually figures out that self-censorship probably ain't such a bad idea.
I don't like what blogging has done to my private life. People who know me don't read my blog; they check it like a pulse. My days of nocturnal blogging under the influence are long gone and the emo confessions have mostly given way to rhetoric and absurdity, so now people intent on mining the site for information interpret word choice, paragraph length and the stupid little extra fields that I fill out on impulse and forget five minutes later.
This, of course, pisses me off. I don't like having to defend or explain three words I throw out at random when confronted with a blinking cursor. I don't like having people call me because they're worried about the tone of a blog entry. Most of all, I don't like when people I know subject a lightweight creative outlet to intense analysis. It's a blog, folks, not a key to my psyche.
Most of the time, a post like this ends with "... so I'm shutting down this blog." I'm not doing it. I like this blog and I've put a lot of work into it, and I love writing for it. But I have shaped it into something very different from what it was a year ago, or even six months ago. I've been cutting out interpersonal drama and trying instead to work on my writing skills.
The transition isn't complete, of course. Sometimes I feel like I do have to break that fourth wall and give up something personal. This is one of those times, I guess. So here goes:
I'm a serial killer. And I broke up with my boyfriend.
Pick one.