Another blog post about blog posts

Not to be postmodern or self-reflexive or self-conscious about the form but just to say that I’m going through a process of discovering what I love and in the process of discovering what I love I realized as I was exiting the bathroom that the reason I didn’t feel comfortable in the comments section at Salon for the whole 12 years I was writing those 2,300-odd Since You Asked advice columns was that I felt uncomfortable discussing the people who had written to me for advice, and I felt uncomfortable discussing what I had written, and I felt protective toward the people who had written to me. I felt unequal to the task of knowing fully what they ought to do and where they fit in the moral, judgmental hierarchy into which we were always placing them. Also uncomfortable about evaluating what I had written, because what I had written was written in a fire of passion that might not be professional and might not be aesthetically pure and might not be ethical if you get right down to it. There was an ethical stink about the whole thing, frankly, much as it warms my heart that people are helped by it. There is an ethical stink about it not just because the kind of help people actually really need is so hard to find, not just because a stranger on the Internet is a poor substitute for a flesh-and-blood person who cares (though yes of course words can heal at a distance, and inspire, and light up), not just because I myself am ambivalent about as a writer taking the next easiest thing that will make me money rather than doing the very hard but true thing which is to take the mainstream literary stage boldly and without apology, but mostly because, as I realize now, I was not comfortable talking about other people that I don’t know.

I do not like to gossip. Gossip makes me uncomfortable but if it were just that I wouldn’t care. It isn’t my discomfort that’s at issue. It’s why I’m uncomfortable with gossip. It feels like a kind of murder.s;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;a

? (did you see that series of semicolons? that was the result of my dozing off in this chair as I sat wondering should I even publish this. That was me falling asleep at the keyboard.)

This discomfort discussing the ills and woes of others who have written to me for advice contrasts with my perfect ease talking about random stuff that happens to me, and my whole trophy case of bullshit opinions. Like the fact that I’m unhappy about Steven Colbert taking David Letterman’s place, and that I never liked R.E.M. (they sounded like ornament; the Clash sounded like rock; even the Talking Heads sounded like they came from necessity; R.E.M. sounded like they came from abstraction, from cake decoration, from a jangly, riffy notion of what might be cool). In fact–and here is what I am just beginning to grok about this whole fucking awful blogging situation–I also have thought that my life was not interesting, and still think so, but am writing as a kind of aggression suppressed Lo these long dozen years during which I used suffering as a platform for my tap dance and literary recitation under the hot lights of an imagined Broadway, an imagined crowd beyond the pixellated footlights. That’s another thing that, say what you will, has always had a bit of ethical stink about it: My use of the pain of others, however good my intentions, however salutary the results. Surely I have done some good; surely my ability to sit for hours or days working through someone else’s complex problem, trying each avenue like moving chess pieces to see what devastating outcome was likely if, say, she told the truth or didn’t tell the truth or confronted her father or didn’t confront her father etcetera, has given the world some good things. Surely I have not been a huckster or a con, and surely out of this pact with those who are suffering I have produced some interesting, affecting and at times I’m sure, out of 2,300 columns, occasionally moving and surprising writing.

Yet for me there has always been, as I say, this ethical stink, and this air of its being provisional and not at the white-hot core of destiny. I have stumbled into things. I have riffed. I have stumbled onto stages unprepared and read spontaneously from just-written texts; I have improvised my way; I have through sheer bravado delivered what sounds like literary work but may on closer inspection prove to be ingenious facsimile. I know I am capable of these things and I am half the time secretly joking as I write, as my father was secretly joking as he entertained us with his tales, tongue literally in cheek. I am multilayered and contradictory and who isn’t? I am this and that both at the same time and who isn’t? And with this comes the guilt of the actor, the guilt of the journalist always selling someone out, the guilt of the memoirist using others’ pain for performance and backdrop and foil.

So to be always writing the column and only writing the column was like being a merchant seaman but not in the Marines; like being in the next room while the grownups decide who will be mayor.

Now I can cuss. Now I can write long sentences and not worry if they even completely grammatically hold together, though I believe they mostly do, rattling ragged into the station but still mostly not burdened with unconnected concluding gerund phrases and other not-wholly grammatical stylistic novelties that displease me. (Ha ha whose joke is that now?  Who is deliberately tearing things apart just to see how they crash?) Now I can be the person who is not that gentle and kind. Now I can say that many things displease me, including the tentativeness that passes for manners and respect, and the refusal to look me in the eye that passes for cool in Oakland.