Perhaps my sub conscious just needs to be identified with Mr. Top G. Cruise. Maybe I wish for an attractive instructor to ask me too whether my parents disapproved of me when they named me what they did.
It is possible that James Dean has an agenda and would continue his protestations till there is a crash.
Rebel. Maverick. Anti-establishment, a statement-maker, the anti-blogger. For various reasons that is how I have started out.
This is how it happened. A certain lady, whom I had chanced upon in a Literati “bored” room and later met for breakfast had handed me her URL. For the longest time, despite her persistence, I avoided reading what she wrote on her “’blog”. The lady had an impressive and unusual vocabulary like most Literati players do. They have to. The secret ingredient of winning it requires that one be extraordinary and use extraordinary means to do that. So “’blog” seemed to be another non-sensical and perfectly useless word, unless one had a triple word score space to occupy and a “khunnas” game to win.
She finally managed to lure an unsuspecting me there by mentioning that she had written about her trip and our tête-à-tête. It had been an hour of focused discussion on relationships over a cup of coffee (me) and a tankard of lager (her). Should I then not have been disappointed when I came across a one-liner stating that she had been to so and so town and the ONLY person she met there was JW? This, after wading through an avalanche of words and trivia (at least to me!).
I passed on the link to someone I had grown extremely fond of and close to in the last three years, with a suggestion that maybe we could “’blog” together. That never happened. In the dying days of 2003, I forever lost someone and something precious to me. By February this year, the “white sheet was well drawn over pale face”. My Muse had left me for "a better deal elsewhere".
Flashback a couple of hundred years to when I was 17 and DID maintain a diary. Many of us might remember those times, staring at a stranger in the mirror, as intense and lonesome years. Suffice it to say that some archetypes never leave us. It could be a statement by an older, wiser person, a father figure or even your own Pater familias about the “sort of people who maintain diaries” and it will continue to haunt you till you are ready to deal with it.
To Ms Literati’s credit though, she wrote shorn of all pretense. She wrote honestly and straight from the heart. She was a dare-all, bare-all, exotic dancer, an out and out exhibitionist and an uninhibited one at that. She was on the floor, performing and being paid in emotional currency for that. More than anything else, she was aware that she was a public figure and this is what was expected of her…and she delivered.
This in itself was sufficient reason for me to shun the blogdom even as I embraced the world of words.
AA) I do not do well in myriad superficial relationships. Au contraire, I am happy with a few intense ones. Lets just say I am a one on one, whisper me, long soul-searching e-mails sort of a person as opposed to a “comment on your ‘blog, talk to me in the room, afraid of intimacy and phobic about commitment” person.
BB) I am more of a voyeur than an exhibitionist, though I do admit one follows the other. And payback time is nigh. You’ve shown me yours, that too I will admit.
CC) The entire world of the bloggers to me resembles a nudist camp except that the fig leaf and the mask are well in place.
DD) The “bytten” word has been the cause of some betrayal, or the manifestation of it at least. There is hurt. Hurt works both ways. And hence gets compounded.
EE) Diaries in the family (Mum’s included) have been maintained when some hitherto healthy relationship has frayed itself into dysfunctional tatters.
…. And then my Mother started blogging .AND my Father followed suit. *Sigh* HOW things change!