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this month we celebrate not only the 225th birthday of our grand, sad nation but also the second anniversary of this journal. back in july of 1999, having been unkindly ousted from a comfortable, 13-year-old nest in joliet, i found myself in a new community, about to continue work as an english teacher at a new (to me) school. i was a hurting, angry, lost, embarassed, disgusted little boy of almost 49 - doing what i could to put the best face on it all, spouting the requisite pieties and platitudes to fend off the pity of friends and neighbors, dogs and cats. on the first day of my move here to mundelein, i plugged in this imac. didn't have a desk or a chair, but i did have a phone jack. i plugged it in just to "check my e-mail"... but i was really checking to see what part of the world might still be knowable...or at least a little familiar. and at some point during that first e-mail check i decided to set up this journal. on that first page i wrote
a noble thought, but accurate enough. i aimed for civility because i knew that people who know me in "the real world" would be reading, and i did not want to be here someone other than the person they knew there. and that civility has often held me back from the kind of expression that (i have discovered) is quite common in these weblogs. i mean writing that uses the freedom of relative anonymity to say absolutely whatever comes to mind in whatever form...apparently spontaneous writing that is mostly angry and sad, damp with venom and tears. (i envy that freedom. at one point i set up a completely anonymous journal just to vent. i posted a few rotten entries and gave it up. it felt sleazy and pornographic, though it wasn't. and i learned that i didn't want anonymity - i wanted to be known...boring old fart that i am.) yes, my civility has bored you. it has bored me. i had hoped to write Interesting Observations of The Ordinary in place of Spectacular Tabloid Revelations, and i found just how difficult it is to see value on in or beneath the veneer of everydayness. but that's life, ain't it? and that's the necessary work. a great red hawk taunted and repelled by a tiny black bird. |
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Leonard Cohen |