Personal Encyclopedia

I think, for the most part, that is what a blog really is. At least that is what this blog is. The things that I write about are important to me to be sure. They should help some people understand me better. With any luck some of the topics should help others understand themselves or their friends and family. It is not really the cowards way of saying something. It may be a heavy handed way of saying something at times. But I do not put it here to make anyone feel bad. I am trying to process a lot of things. Some from the Past and some from the very present Present.

For instance, I have written things about classmates, cloaked in nom-deplume and aliases so as not to embarrass them. Some of those things are painful for me and given how much faster they matured than I did insofar as releasing the past, the alias protects (I hope) them from derision or ridicule. I've never intended to do more than process the pain and lend some words of wisdom to those who read this and see themselves as the victim or the bully. In time it does get better. And all of these event help shape us.

Those who are in my life now can go "Ah! Now I get what happened here." Some of those stories explain my trust issues. Some of them explain my thought processes. Mostly though they just tend to me be asking people in my life for some slack without having to tell every single story out loud over and over again. I write it down to kinda put a rest to it. It is part of my story. But when I do not have to use my breath to enliven the words I do not relive the pain. It is passive instead of active and it makes life easier to deal with.

But then there are things that I muse over, things that strike me while I am reading other blogs that make me go hmmm.... there is something here that needs attention. It is not a back handed condemnation. It is mostly a "here is an interesting topic. This is what I think about it." If it is interesting enough to open a dialog in person then I would hope readers would dialog with me about it.

I took a little heat for the post about art lifestyle. In that I was addressing the conflicts of the past trying to share a room with my sister, sharing a house with another artist, sharing a house with non-artists, and dealing with the invitations I've had to cohabitate from four different people. But I was also commisserating with the artists who follow this blog. We share a commonality and that is the practicality of being and artist in a non-art environment. We don't live on our own little islands when we make art and there are territorial issues for each of us. And for the non-artist reader I was trying to work out some sort of an explaination for why it is so difficult to live with some of us as something of an Ambassador to the non-art-speaking among us.

If we (me and person from whom I took some heat) were not in the middle of deeper topics I would have explained this. But I kinda feel like I've explained this all a million times before. So I'm sorry that with this very post I've done what you asked I not do. But you are not the only one who needed to be reminded that the blog as an online journal and personal encyclopedia is essentially a repository of things that make the writer who they are and allows the people who are interested in knowing that person the ability to access information at their own convenience. In much the same way a diamond does not wait around to be asked how it forms and what it is made of or how long it took to get the way it is but merely exists... so too do I exist. Anyone who wants to know  a thing or two about a diamond can look that information up whenever one wants to. One doesn't have to wake up the diamond. It doesn't run the risk of pissing off the diamond by asking the same question endlessly. So too, anyone who would know me better may access the blog and be informed...

That's all it is. If it applies. It applies. But generally I do not write without the thought that my posts may be helpful in some way to the general public.