Shark-infested waters, and my ass is bare here.

Okay, this post will serve to address something I’ve been thinking about for several months now, but I’ve not really seen addressed here in Cyberia.

I love this forum. I get to express myself with a certain detachment while still employing a great deal of feeling. Since it’s still in its ‘Wild West’ phase, there is a generous amount of flippancy, a degree of cavalier approach if you will, that I am afforded. This is not the case with other, more ’structured’ formats in which I could be published were I to make an effort toward that end. I get to play with the language unfettered, I get to bare myself in a way that is not practical in other arenas. This is not to say that I am not the person you read on the screen. This is not to say that I don’t believe in owning the consequences of my words.

Okay, only a couple paragraphs in and already I’m straying….

This weblog started as a big, vain, open-ended conversation with myself. It still is that, with the exception that now there are people tuning in to check out what idiocy I may spout next. The way that I am able to write here lends to a sense of intimacy for the reader, which initially was only me. Now that area has expanded to include you, darlin’. I don’t begrudge you that in the least. I’ve made some incredible connections that way, I’ve received help in ways that I never would have imagined and in turn have lent help in (sometimes very passive and unbeknownst to me at the time) fashions I could have never dreamed of. Nope, not in my wildest imaginings.

For as much as I say some very valid relationships can and do stem from this type of thing, there is the flipside that I’ve been loathe to mention because it just sort of comes off as sounding all stilted and snipey and wrong. I just can’t seem to ignore it any longer, however.

I think that I’m a pretty approachable person. Although I’m not fond of people (in a general sense) overmuch, I do like interaction. I don’t mind throwing the die and crapping out, because I know that every now and again I’ll chuck that sucker across the felt and come up roses. Paydirt in the form of a delicious exchange will come across my field of vision, and maybe a mutually agreeable and desirable situation called kinship will occur. This happens to me more often than I’m entitled, I’m sure. But….

Every now and again I will hear from someone and it freaks me the fuck out. They have been reading my schlock for ‘x’ amount of weeks or months or years and for whatever reason decide to reach out toward me. But they come from the position of ‘knowing’ me; that, coupled with the fact that I didn’t know them from Adam’s housecat ten minutes before, unsettles me to a great degree. Yes, I am very intimate –sometimes painfully so– here, and I’m unapologetic for that. Some days to hold back would simply feel like cheating. Not cheating you….cheating me: cheating myself out of the release that the words sometimes bring, cheating myself out of a record to touch back on sometime in the future (verrrry useful, believe it or not), cheating myself out of open expression, cheating myself out of (the illusion of?) freedom.

Bottom line is, in an initial correspondence, you simply don’t address someone with a degree of familiarity beyond cursory, shallow details. For all that you are privy to here, there are dozens of other aspects to me that you’ve no notion of. You may have a sense of knowing me based on my words, but it is at best a working knowledge and not completely definitive. One reader touched on this recently, and I applaud him for his brilliance:

I’ve been reading [Abuantg] for, I dunno, at least a few years. In the past, I’ve approached as a reader to a favorite column, glad every time a new installment of well-crafted words appears. I’ve always known there was a real live person behind it all, but in a distant sort of way.

Lately it’s feeling more like a one-sided friendship, where I get to hear all about you, rejoicing with you in times of celebration and wonder, ranting with you at the world’s abundant stupidity (esp. here in our Alabama), and aching sympathetically in the times we just can’t understand. And you don’t hear squat from me. So, for that, I apologize.

Let’s give a gigunda cheer for Rod, shall we? Because after Rod wrote that spankingly lovely intro, he went on to tell me how he got here and a few details about himself. He made me feel, I dunno…less exposed, and not required to be his friend. It was less of ‘Wow, I’m so glad to be your (just add water and stir) pal, even though you don’t know a fucking thing about me in return!’ and more of ‘Hey, here I am, I’m pretty nifty if you want to check me out.’

None of this is to say that I don’t enjoy making your acquaintance, whomever you may be, whither thou roamst and all that other poetic hoo-ha. I don’t wish to discourage that in the least. I fully realize that there are those of you I’ve never even heard from and mayhap never will, for whatever reason. Hell, there are likely people that come here so that they can have someone/something to despise as a matter of course (because, you will recall, we’ve all been told: ‘Jett Superior is a flake’). I’m okay with that, because everyone’s gotta have a hobby. You should just know that I’m more than the sum of my content, which roams and veers wildly from inane to silly to thoughtful to stupid to heartfelt and to-the-bone. I mean all of it….really mean it, but it is merely the surface of a crazy, fractal mishmosh that can’t (and maybe shouldn’t) be represented fully here.

Just keep that in mind, and we’ll all be okay.