Dear Colleen:
Thanks for the thanks.
I wanted to respond publicly to your comment that:
One of the main reasons I do not have a blog of my own is that I secretly wonder if I would censor myself into only sharing the “nice” parts of me.
I have considered and reconsidered the voice I want my blog to have on Everyday Matters. Not that I spend hours pining and wondering about such things, but more that I tend to speak with a specific voice but periodicaly reconsider and veer off and talk in another. This has mixed results. I often find that when I change the POV , the comments fall silent. Early on, I raged about the war in Iraq and people stood back as if I was having a fit. When I drew dildoes, some freaked. When I drew Jerusalem and expressed my dislike for Israeli policies, I got some hate mail. When I referred to myself as “a pussy”, I kicked off a week-long semantic debate.
(In fact, I wrote one particularly cryptic entry in which I expressed the fact that I do not feel I can be contained in the single voice I have created here.)
I have tended to stay away from writing about the election just because a) politics can alienate people from my true objective, namely to chronicle and consider creative issues and b) I think there are a lot of better informed bloggers expressing my perspective far better than I can and c) I don’t want to be diverted by responding to a lot of inflamed and irrelevant discussion on this topic.
By virtue of its anonymity, the Internet tends to favor two sorts of voices. The “ultra-nice, please be my friend, I am me at my best, calm, serene and full of love” and “the fuck you, you’re a moron, I piss on your site and feel no fear of accountability” sort of voice. There’s not an awful lot of in between because people feel that a healthy dose of complexity will create an unclear brand or a position of neutrality will strike people as uninteresting. Love or hate. That’s’ what it seems to boil down too. Black or white. Pro or con. Blue or red. Just like politics.
Blogging is media. It’s broadcasting. It’s public. It’s not journal keeping. People have short attention spans and they want to know when they log on, that they will get a certain type of experience. Deviations are disturbing.
Deviants are not.
Your pal,
Danny
Danny Gregory 