Vie en Rues #5

La Vie en Rues, #5 July 10, 2005 Motley Crue and Postcards from Home Whenever I sit down to write something to family and friends, I’m torn. This mailing list you’re on is pretty big --- by my modest standards, anyway --- and, collectively, you’re a tough crowd. Which is, I suppose, the way I like it, but it doesn’t make the writing easy. Here’s the problem: you’re a motley lot. You are. There was no intelligent design to how this list began, and there’s been plenty of messy evolution since. I’ve put everyone on it whom I’ve met and liked enough that I hope to keep in contact. Some other folks have snuck on, too. There are a few who have gotten a piece of my writing forwarded to them, at some point, and have asked to be copied on future spouts. And then there’s family, who can’t get away. Can’t run. Can’t hide. In the few years I’ve been doing this by e-mail, you all haven’t been very critical. That makes you sound like an easy crowd. Only one person, a friend’s girlfriend, has ever been reported as lumping my e-mails in the blowhard-textual-masturbation category. And, so far, everyone who has added me to their spam filter has been polite enough not to mention it to me. I just assume that not hearing from them means they must be terribly busy at work, lately. But the silence only proves that several hundred people in the world are adhering to the maxim about staying quiet if saying something nice isn’t an option. It does not mean you’re not an easy crowd. Well-mannered, pleasant, uncritical, good-looking, perhaps, but the fact is you’re impossible to please. When I write cultural observations about freaky foreign climes, I get a dozen e-mails saying, “That’s nice, but what’s actually going on in your life?” Same reaction when I write about politics, but then that’s the stuff that, by a wide margin, gets forwarded the most. (I think even my Dad, a Bush Republican, forwards my political stuff, but to the FBI.) But when I *do* write about personal stuff, I know there’s a whole lot of people thinking, “I really, really, really don’t care what you had for dinner.” Only they’re too polite to say it, of course. This is one of the reasons I’ve written less and less frequently. I’m paralyzed about what to write. I want it to be interesting. I want you to be rapt (no matter how small this stage). I want to be personal yet sweeping and grand! I want your love and approval, dammit, but for my desire to be wrapped in a cloak of humble intellectualism to be embraced from a safe distance. All of this angst about what to write is taking up mental space, just now, for a simple reason: I’m about to start a blog. I was going to say that I don’t really have a good excuse for starting a blog, but that’s not true. I’d like to write more, and I hope the existence of the blog will force my hand. Ditto for staying in more frequent touch. Plus, I get the cool benefit of being on top of a cultural phenomenon that most 14 year-olds already think is passé. The blogosphere may be a lame way of trying to hang on to the long tail of my youth, but it’s cheaper than a midlife crisis and I get to keep both my marriage and my cash. If you haven’t yet skimmed a few dozen blogs, you’re mostly not missing very much. Blogs are like souped-up on-line diaries, published at the click of a mouse for the whole world to see. It’s so easy, pretty much anyone can do it. So lots and lots of people are. And that’s the problem. It’s like the bad poetry we all wrote in junior high school. Just because we all wrote it doesn’t mean it wasn’t all crap. The statistical likelihood of landing on a good blog by accident is lower than launching a successful sitcom. When you do find a good blog, however, it’s a treat. They’re written by people living their lives in a very public space, and doing it because they have something they’re at least a bit passionate about. Bad blogs, on the other hand, are simply inane. Imagine self-absorbed, unimaginative people writing letters to themselves. Some voice strong, ill-informed and ungrammatical opinions; others appear to have no opinions at all. It’s hard to say which is worse. The medium, itself, invites the inanity. Personal broadcast is intrinsically self-centered, if not arrogant. It’s an act that declares one has something to say and thinks others will want to read it. If it ain’t that, one could just write a diary. No need to put it on Blogger. Blogger (and its ilk) is the old-time soap-box speaker’s corner on a massive scale. But make it this easy to publish to a potentially global audience, and you find that the number of people who have something truly interesting to say isn’t exactly correlated with the number of people who want to be heard. It’s not that most people’s lives and thoughts are intrinsically boring. It’s just that most people aren’t particularly interesting when they talk about them. Starting my own blog makes all this stuff pound inside my head. On the one hand, the bar is pretty low. On the other hand, I really, really don’t want to end up just adding to the blowhard-textual-masturbatory inanity. It’s easy to not completely suck, but it ain’t easy to be great. Also, the thought of transitioning from this cozy, motley little e-mail list of friends, family and unfortunates to a public space has been a little daunting. As long as I was just e-mailing to you lot, the letters didn’t really have to be *about* anything. No implication of thematic consistency, one letter to the next. If wanted to rant, I’d rant. If I wanted to write about Geri being beautiful, I’d do that. Could I do that on a blog? Would a blog only make sense if I took the whole thing more seriously? A blog, it seems to me, needs more internal consistency to be coherent. Writing about Carl Rove one day and the magic of electronic drums the next doesn’t make a lot of sense. I wrestled with this for a while. Then I remembered you lot. The whole reason I started writing to you in the first place was to keep in touch. Everything else is just me rattling on about whatever’s filling my head. In other words, it’s mostly letters and post cards and notes on the fridge, with the occasional letter to the op-ed editor. So, if you ever visit my blog, that’s what you’ll find there, too. For anyone who cares, I plan to continue sending out these e-mail spams every now and then, but I’ll be trying to put more frequent, quick things on the blog. We’ll see how that works out. If you want to visit, the doors to www.postcardsfromhome.blogspot.com are now open. There’s not much on the shelves, yet, but you’re welcome just the same. Come back often. Cheers. --h