Happy anniversary

I started this blog one year ago this week.  My first post was about an overnight stay in a small city in France.  I’ve been asked several times why I write and post my thoughts online; for some it’s a kind of arrogance, for others its been viewed as a violation of privacy, while still others are just puzzled by the seeming contradiction of it.  I am radically open but in a quiet way – there’s no effort on my part to increase web traffic other than occasional requests of readers to forward on the link – which is strange.  I’m not jumping up and down, calling attention to myself, but I am talking publicly about deeply personal things, or at least, things which are deeply personal to me.

In Rome, there is a tradition dating back to the time of the empire of posting critiques (if polite) or insults (if not) of matters of public debate on posters which are pasted around the public water fountains of the city.  One such site around the Piazza Navonna is particularly famous, and is still used today – when the ex-wife did her study abroad semester in Rome, I visited the spot often.  There was a lovely cafe on the other side of the water spigot’s small square which at lunchtime always had a good number of Vatican priests eating pasta and drinking wine, and having been told that Vatican priests are usually good indicators of good restaurants, I ate there quite a few times on my visits.  The wall above the spigot was thick with pasted pieces of paper, marked by a statue of someone called Pasquino.  Being written in Italian I couldn’t make out what the posters were arguing about, but it wasn’t lame sloganeering – these were densely written essays, printed on letter-sized paper, and as I’d linger over wine and cheese I’d watch the locals come and read them in detail, sometimes then posting their own essays as well.  The essays were either unsigned or signed with some pen name, and it occurred to me that that form of public, anonymous essay was my ideal.

When I moved back to Seattle after the divorce, there was for awhile a neighborhood essayist who would paste up his (or her) essays on the telephone poles around Leschi.  It was again anonymous but the format made it appear to be a single author (although it would be easy enough to copy the 12 point Times New Roman font and justified line spacing, so it could just as easily been a kind of beck-and-call between multiple anonymous authors).  The essays talked about the author’s first bike ride of the spring, and his ambiguous relationship to God and Christ, and the experience of being lower middle class and black in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.  They would stay up until the rain of Seattle would seep through the paper and eventually they would fall off and blow away.  That meant summer postings might stay up for several months, giving you time to reconsider each essay when the dog went on one of his several walks, while winter postings would vanish in a matter of days, and you couldn’t be sure you’d missed a post or not.

The public postings were a mix, sometimes more tone poem than essay, sometimes more op-ed opinion piece than anything particularly personal, but like Pasquino’s pasted ramblings it was a kind of ideal form to me.  And the telephone pole essays were a kind of private world for me as well; I brought up the postings once with my upstairs neighbor and once with the ex-girlfriend, but it didn’t resonate with either of them – they hadn’t noticed the posters, and my pointing them out didn’t make them any more compelled to look.

That’s the format I’m trying for here, something public but unobtrusive, trying to catch the eye of people who are also walking down a street but still thinking about the entirety of creation within their heads, catching them when they are out in public but with private energy, with private thoughts.

That doesn’t really say why I write these postings, though.  I’ve struggled with getting to an answer there.  I’m definitely trying to find or inspire a debate, but this is a pretty roundabout way of doing so, I have to admit, so maybe it’s not really that.  I’ve thought that there is a kind of pride at work too – “look at me, I can write, aren’t I grand” – but when I have that thought I usually hit a wall of writer’s block and stop for awhile.  I thought at one point I was writing to excise the pain of a breakup, or the terror of facing mortality, but again, writing doesn’t do any of that – if anything, it just reinforces the hurt and forces me to stare down mortality, and loss, and failure, to stare them down all the more directly.  There is no exorcism at work in writing, just an intensification of focus.

My father thinks that I’m really writing for my son, for him to have a record of what it’s like to be me so that when he gets older, he’ll know me.  But it’s entirely possible that he won’t be any more interested than most of the people of Rome, or in Leschi, who walk by the postings on fountain walls and telephone poles and glance at the words but really wonder why anyone would bother to write them at all.  So while I do hope he reads these someday, it’s not the reason I’m writing them.

But regardless, here I am, writing, fifty-five essays later – for those of you who have stuck with me through a year of writing, that’s the equivalent of around a 300 page book, so give yourselves a pat on the back.  Reading fifty-five essays, the majority of which have no argument, no point that is being forcefully argued, which are mostly just examinations in words of how it feels to be alive on a planet which is on the cusp of something monumental but none of us know what, is quite an exercise.  Thank you so much for reading, for being my silent partners in debate, and thank you for helping to reshape and redefine my own thinking by virtue of your audience.