- Palomba
The first blog I ever read shut down this week. Posted its last entry and disappeared into the sunset.
It belonged to someone I'd seen around, and the only reason I read it is because I was amazed I had stumbled upon it. It was just one of those strange coincidences. Whenever I think of something profound, I do a websearch to see where my mind stole it from. Sometimes the thoughts really are mine, and sometimes they're not. Sometimes it just happens that someone else was thinking the exact same thing I was. I did a web search for something else...and there she was.
I've been reading it ever since, and along the way I picked up a few dozen others. I've read hundreds of these things now. There are some I read every day, others I stop in at when I'm bored.
The thing is somewhere along the way I started to feel like it was wrong. I didn't know, or hardly knew most of these people and here I was sharing little bits of their lives with them. Their highs and lows, their victories and defeats, their make-ups, break-ups and everything in between. Reading about other people's lives without them knowing it, it made me feel guilty. But of course they put those things out there on purpose, they wrote those things because they wanted them to be read. Much like I do here.
But they would feel odd if they knew I was reading them. Anytime someone tells me they read my "thing" I answer the same way, "You shouldn't." Not because I don't want them to, but because this tends to bother people. I know because other people's blogs bother me, and this one is slightly more fucked up than other people's blogs.
So what brings about this deeper look at what I've begun to call the Blog-ocracy, a loosely tied together series of webpages that are essentially public versions of people's private journals?
A rather minor incident from Tuesday night, of course nothing is minor on Tuesdays anymore.
On Friday morning I posted an anonymous comment on Julie from WRSU's blog. She had posted an entry that seemed uncertain, made it seem like she was getting down on herself. It made me feel bad that someone who has always been so nice to me was feeling down, so I did what I always do when someone is feeling down...I said what I was thinking, in this case it turned out to be something nice and reassuring.
Of course she read this and even commented on it in her next post, and I never thought it would come up again. Except that I underestimated the average persons penchant for a good mystery. The anonymous tag made the note something of interest.
So how did it come up Tuesday night in the radio station?
Simple...or not. There was a single copy of the Daily Targum left in the rack on Tuesday night. (I always take a copy of the Targum into the restroom with me, you know in case I run out of toilet paper, old joke, still not funny) Usually I just leave it next to the sink for the next guy to read, except when I came out of the can Mr. Belding from Saved By The Bell was standing there, stopping for a quick break between the Cap & Skull room and his apperance with Screech downstairs. So I took the Targum back to the newsroom and dropped it on the desk. Where three hours later Julie picks it up and reads in her horoscope that someone from her past is going to give her good advice. Since I'm the only one in the room she reads it out loud to me. She seems surprised that her horoscope is actually accurate and says as much. But by the time she brings up the post by the anonymous commenter I'm already halfway through writing this entry...in part because I already knew where the conversation was going.
I was halfway through writing this entry while she was still telling me about the comment because, for a second, I actually thought about not confessing that I was the anonymous commenter. It's irrational, but for some reason I was actually embarassed that I had been reading her blog. Embarassed that I read all those blogs I read. All of a sudden I was doing something wrong, something I shouldn't have been doing. It was like I had some sort of scopophilia (please let that be what I think it is) except it involved blogs, a blog-ophilia if you would. Suddenly, just by doing something I've been doing for a long time, I was doing something wrong.
I had to stop her from explaining any further, so when she got to the point where she said she had no idea who could have posted the comment I interjected. Except I couldn't actually say it, so I went all Koko the Gorilla and twice jabbed two fingers into my own chest. She stopped, and besides being utterly shocked I couldn't tell whether she wanted to hit me or hug me.
Of course that wasn't the end of the conversation, I had to explain that I've been reading her blog for awhile now, which means two weeks ago when she was telling me about all the things that had happened to her since we'd last talked...I already knew them. And I had to explain how I'd found her blog.
Which is a remarkable coincidence in and of itself. See there's this blog I've been reading for a long time now, by a girl named Sarah. I've been reading it since before I even knew Julie, which is strange because Sarah happens to be one of Julie's best friends. Now her blog is one of the best I've read so I read it fairly often, and somewhere along the way she linked to Julie's. So now I'm not just reading the blog of someone who knows someone I know, now I'm reading the blog of someone I know.
Out of the millions of these things out there, and the hundreds of these things I read it took two clicks of the mouse to get back to someone who actually knows me. And only a half dozen strange coincidences for them to find out about it...on the same week that the first blog I read (and first blog of coincidence) went away.
Now not to seem that I'm making mountains out of mole hills here. Tuesday night's oddities alone didn't give birth to this entry, nor did that original blog going away. Talking to someone about my blog last night had a little to do with this as well. But the real trigger wasn't what happened in real life, but what people have written.
I've always been obsessed with Dante's Inferno, a story which at its core is about a man chasing heaven through the depths of hell. Purgatory and Paradise are splendid, but I've read Inferno so many times at so many different points in my life that it means a lot to me. I own a half dozen different copies of it, and I almost bought an old rare copy of it a few months back. To compensate on losing out on that one I bought an illustrated modern interpretation from Barnes & Noble. The rare edition would have cost over $1,000. This one cost me $22...and did the trick just fine.
The original opening lines as writ by Dante always fascinated me:
"Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost."
But the new interpretation of those lines by Birk & Sanders struck me twice as hard:
"About halfway through the course of my pathetic life,
I woke up and found myself in a stupor in some dark place.
I'm not sure how I ended up there; I guess I had taken a few wrong turns."
And, yeah, that's me.
And this is my Inferno. All these other people share their lives with me through their blogs, and here I share mine.
People have told me time and time again that they've started to read this, and ended up, without intending to, reading the whole damn thing. I figure people like that know me just about as well as anyone in my life. And the people who know me that read this know me far better than they ever would have liked.
It's a new week I'm about to get through that nine day stretch and see what happens next. Tuesday might be my last show at WRSU, but I've decided that I'm going to try and stay in touch with the people I met during my time at Rutgers. I may never see New Brunswick again, but a little bit of me will always be there.
So much has happened, so much has changed, but somehow things are all still eerily familiar.
If you've kept up, now you're caught up.
This is where I am at, I'm not sure how I ended up here; I guess I've taken a few wrong turns.
But...
"Everything does happen for a reason, and sometimes the reasons have reasons all their own."
- Palomba
The Disclaimer: This is one of those long winding entries that no one will have the patience to read. I don't just know that, I'm counting on it.
No comments:
Post a Comment