Cleaning out my closet

September 17, 2007

 

 

I completely forgot to mark a year off my life maintaining this blog. I hope that oversight was not my subconscious telling me how pointless this whole thing is because up to now I feel a bit ambivalent about blogging and the repeated self-immolation it entails to churn out even a decent post.

Though to be fair, it’s a personal milestone for me. Who would have thought? I actually wasted a year on something that’s neither mildly therapeutic nor remotely erotic.  Maybe because I’ve been very clinical about my approach to blogging: a great experiment that, if proven successful, might hopefully improve my writing and maybe get in touch with the inner writer in me — that squeaky, dirty voice which have been muted by years of neglect and disregard.

It’s a funny thing, this writing business or more specifically, the business side of writing. I realized that when I started to make a livelihood of writing, the fun in weaving letters together to form words, stitching words together to create paragraphs and organizing paragraphs together to construct a story completely vanished. Work certainly has the penchant to wring the fun out of something you love. At one point, writing ceased to be an abstract concept that I pursue almost to an obsession; all its intangibles were missing and it evolved into something mundane, as concrete and solid as the ashen keyboard I’m using to type this shit.

By the way, my obsession with writing, in relation to my family having produced no writer along the line of its genealogy, refutes the old maxim “shit doesn’t fall too far away from the ass.” I hesitate to call it love affair in lieu of obsession only because the term love affair insinuates reciprocation.

Was it Nietzsche who said that if you have something to live for, you could endure the how?  So what keeps me coming back? Apart from the practical aspect because make no mistake, blogging is a sensible way to practice your writing skills, there’s the extra gravy – fellow bloggers who wittingly or unwittingly hitched a ride in my journey.

The fact that I have yet to see even a shadow of these bloggers, much less meet them, is insignificant. Humans have the need to be a part of something bigger than their puny selves and that accounts for the omnipresence of the godhead. No matter how independent you think you are, you always seek the affirmation of your peers and the acceptance of your betters. In that sense, perverted childhood does not translate to neuroses as Freud suggested, it’s the lack of recognition that causes more psychological damage.

To complete the picture, my account asks for a password and username before I could log in and write this post just like most exclusive cliques which also demand a code, be it a secret handshake or a tattoo, to distinguish it from the others or cloak the group with a sense of inimitability. That password is something I share in common with fellow bloggers, and lest I be accused of being an elitist, I have a ready-made excuse: my password allows me to protect my account from hackers.

This is my clique, no matter how transitory and I like that because anyway I look at it, I always come to the same conclusion: I am a closet blogger.