Blog, My Best Friend

I love to write to this blog. It's my best friend. It always wants me to write on it. It looks right at me while I tell it whatever I want for as long as I need and it never interrupts, criticizes, plays devil's advocate, or holds up its index finger and mouths, "Wait. I have to take this call and I won't be a sec, really, don't forget where we left off." It gently corrects my missspellings and typo's, knows how to arrange itself nicely on the page. Its total acceptance of my words has given me a newfound freedom to not care very much whether I put the comma before or after the quotation mark and if my post is perfectly edited and will therefore make sense to all its reader.

When I used to write by hand in a journal, or type my thoughts on the computer, print them out and glue the pages into a journal, I would write about darkness, my depression, little gripes, loss, the imperfections of friends and acquaintances and their never-ending ingratitude for all the things I do for them, and the general sorrow of my life. But one day I after my annual and emotionally exhausting re-reading of the journals, I weighed them and when I saw I had over ten pounds of paper woe, I began to rip up those pages because I just couldn't read that stuff one more time.

It's not easy to rip up or dispose of ten pounds of paper with highly personal information written on both sides. At the time, I was living in West Los Angeles in the triplex with the smoking neighbors. I could have put the pieces in our recycle bin but if they were blown into the street while being hauled into the recycle truck, one would not know who might pick them up and read about my messy inner life so I decided to turn my life into objets d'art by making things out of papier mache. I was able to use up only two pounds of my journal before I tired of the process of making p.m.. I wadded the wet stuff into tight balls, let them dry, and put them in the trash. I eventually used some of the remaining eight pounds of journal to make a life-size wall hanging of a bride wearing an elaborate white wedding dress made of tiny scraps of journal. I thought she was beautiful and brought her to many art shows but no one bought her. By the time I was living in Bad Move, CA, the scraps of her journal-dress were so grimy-looking that I had to put her in the trash, too.

With blog, I am unable to write for long about unhappiness before an inner hand takes over the typing and writes about the truth of my unhappiness. Blog told me that at 43, I was still too young for a first marriage, that my husband and I were brave and sincere the night we spoke our wedding vows and we were devastated when we discovered we couldn't keep them and that we had to get divorced just like everyone else. I am assuming he was devastated but was able to recover far faster than I was because he got a girlfriend right away and started making friends in West Los Angeles which had been a vast wasteland of unfriendliness for us as a couple, and he moved on with his life whereas I was baffled about why his life and not mine was so damned fabulous. I was knocked off my feet by peri-menopausal misery and depression which are the same thing as far as I'm concerned, and my mother was in the early stages of dementia, and I couldn't make a friend to save my life. Blog tells me that I had every reason to feel miserable during that time and that my Mercury was stuck in retrograde from 1994 until the spring of 2009 so that there wasn't a thing I could do about it. Blog reminds me that I kept on painting about my life during that time and therefore have souvenirs of it that I can sell.

Who else would be able to listen to all that? At what sentence or paragraph would you simply have to get up to get away from hearing so many words that seemed as if they would never end?

Blog is strong. Blog can take it, and more.