The Post-Journal, or, What If I Threw a Party and Nobody Came?99 Days is over. It's been over for weeks now. The weirdness of not having to update my life for a group of strangers and friends has passed. I got so used to it, I didn't know what to do for awhile. The exhibitionist impulse is strong within me that way. Once the ball of putting yourself out there gets rolling, sometimes it's a little hard to stop. I tried a bunch of things to alleviate that sense of strangeness. I took the page down. I put the page back up. I started some stories. I didn't finish them. I redesigned, moved, and tinkered with my other sites. I launched myself into a new project, Neural Area Network, which was an abject failure. It is said, by such great men as Billy Joel, that you learn more from your mistakes than your successes. If such is the case, I learned volumes about what people will and will not do for their voyeuristic impulses. They will come to your site and read your words. They will not give out their email address if you ask them. They will cheerfully digest all the words you put up on the Web. They will not brook those words coming to their own mailbox, all unbidden. That's all right. It didn't work out. Things happen. This whole experience has gotten me thinking, however, about how much stock I put in the opinions, or even the anonymous pageviews, of others, how much I gauged my own self-worth on how many people were looking at what I wrote each day, and when, and from where. It got so bad that I felt I was disintegrating without feeling someone was watching me and reading about me. An oddly religious feeling to have. It was, however, altogether a bad thing, and I got myself over it. Dance like nobody's watching, right? More than one person has asked me if I'm going to do a web journal again, or anything like it. My answer has always been no. The closed-endedness of 99 Days was intentional and resolute; journals that go on for eternity tend to get dull after awhile. You can pen about profundity all you want when there's a self-imposed deadling hanging over your cranium, but give yourself all the time in the world, and what will you talk about? "I'm boring today. That's too bad because I'm so interesting inside. Blah. Hmm. Phooey. Okay byebye." You and I both know this is true. Even I did it, many times over. The only way we'll resurrect the art of conversation is if we all start dying of cancer. The exhibitionist impulse is so strong, though. It's hard to overcome. Something happens to me, one day, and I feel this terrible urge to write about it, put it up on the web, throw it out for all to see... and then I start wondering.... if I open that door, where does it end? How long till I'm putting up more pointless words, more dipstick ponderings about the color of the leaves, prattling about peanut butter and Miles Davis and fooling myself into thinking I'm making a difference? What if I look up one day and, despite myself, I've gone and made myself a web journal despite all my best efforts not to jump once again on the bandwagon that was tiresome when I started? Even worse, what if I write it down and no one reads? What if I threw a party and nobody came? Yet, here we are. Funny, that. A life update, then. In the time that I've wrapped up 99 Days, life has not, in fact, taken any particularly cataclysmic twists. Misty and I had some fights. We made up. I feel our relationship gets stronger each time this happens. Most of our problems stem from me being locked in my little shell, and every time we hash things over, I come out a little. Winter finally came. I threw that snowball, just like I said I would. I still haven't finished The Brothers Karamazov. I'm still doing about as well as I expected I'd do in school. Registration is this week. It looks like I'll graduate on time after all. I'm pretty happy about that. Work has been going well. The SOE pages should be going up on the server -- well, soon. Sam may be getting his own domain. I don't think I know of anyone who will make as good use of it as I know he will. Ace (speaking of making good use of domain names) worries me a lot. He's working hard, and every time I talk to him, he's depressed or angry or tired, or all of the above. I don't know whether his life is really this bad, or whether I just get lucky, but he sounds so miserable all the time. Ann and I had another quarrel, and we haven't talked much since. We fought, made up, and then stopped talking. Maybe this is the last time. I don't know. I feel like I should do something about it, but I just get so tired of debasing myself for the mistakes I keep making over and over. Then again, I've sort of drifted away from a lot of my other net.friends, too, so maybe it's a trend. Ann once told me she had this feeling that she and I were going in different directions, and those directions somehow meant not being in contact with each other. Maybe she was right. It doesn't stop me from being a little morose about it all. Episodes of writing have been few and far between. I've made stabs at meaningful text, but it lacks the old wire-and-polish that I demand from myself anymore. I'm sure it's just a phase. I am a Cancer after all, and despite what anyone may think about the cosmic horseshit of astrology, my brain moves in cycles. Hopefully there'll be a good one coming around. All in all, it's just more of the same. On one hand, there's too much to say about life; on the other hand, there's nothing to say at all. Life is life. Perhaps you can either live it, or write about it, but never both fully. Dan |