I am considering ending my public retirement blog, archiving it, and for the rest of my days blog posthumously, privately, at another blog I have. I have been blogging a long time, almost from the beginning of the interface. It's natural to me because I respond to everything in writing. That's what writers do. In the beginning, I thought of it as an educational tool for my students. I enjoyed reading the journals and letters of writers, here was a new public way to let writing students into the working mind of a working writer. So I began.
Along the way, however, as blogging became more popular, I saw disadvantages. It began when the chair of the English Dept called me in. A student had complained about my blog. I had written that my current class was slower in getting an important concept than other classes, I had to tweak my syllabus to give them more time. The student was outraged to be called slower than other classes. The chair suggested I stop blogging about my current class.
Nothing outrages me more than censorship and the suggestion of self-censorship. But I went along with it, biting my tongue, because I was old and tired and wanted to keep my job. I hated myself for doing this.
I have never felt more urges of self-censorship than during this recent health crisis. I don't even want to get into it except to say, during my own long recovery from alcohol abuse, a major lesson I learned was not to bang my head against the wall in useless battles. Walk away. It's like the Lew Welch poem at the top of this blog: maybe a small part of it will die if I'm not around feeding it any more.
I think public blogging was run its course with me. In a private blog, published by a friend posthumously, I can say whatever the hell I want about anything or anyone I want without inviting a useless discussion or debate. Opinions are opinions. I am not trying to change anyone's mind. I am trying to understand my own thoughts and why I embrace some and reject others. I am not interested in how you think, I am interested in how I think.
I have become very excited about the short fiction that will come from all this. I think it will be titled, simply, MARRIAGE. My work usually has dark endings, and I suspect this one will as well. No, there is an exception! When my marriage to the woman I thought was my soul mate ended when she came out as a lesbian, my real life response was typical of an ignorant male at the time, the 1970s. Since then, I have reenacted the end in fiction, first in my play THE HALF-LIFE CONSPIRACY, written ten years after the fact. In the play, it is the same breakup but now the ex husband helps the ex wife break up with the very woman she left him for ... he becomes a true friend helping her through a difficult time. Fantasy, wouldn't it have been nice if this is what had happened. So my endings are not always dark.
This ending, of MARRIAGE, is not clear to me, dramatically (or personally, for that matter). No matter at this point. This story will take a year or more to write because it is very complex and layered, and yet will be written very simply, and nothing is harder than to communicate complexity in an elegant simple style that looks like it's just a natural off the top discourse. But that's usually the goal in my work. Misleading simplicity, I suppose you could call it.
I still feel like an alien on the wrong planet but I am glad I have "a job" to do now because it keeps me focused and if I can pull it off, I can return a great favor that Harriet did for me over 20 years ago. She is a fantastic woman and deserves as much brain power back as she can manage herself to get. But no one can get it back for her. She has to it herself. We can guide her, cheer her on, reprimand her, but her life is her own. She will make of it what she will.
So ... how do I convince her how much FUN we can have because she doesn't have to go to any meetings for some months ahead?
If I end this blog, there will be a final R.I.P. post and the blog will remain online, like the earlier one that led to this, archived. At the moment I feel this is a real possibility.
