As usual, I was having trouble producing a topic for my column. My roommate scornfully questioned, \Why are you ignoring the obvious?""
""Because I'm not going to do that,"" I replied with a shrug and a glance at my feet. I'm not going to turn this column into my diary.
People often assume that if you write at a newspaper, then you're a journalist. Writing a column isn't what I would consider doing journalism. I would just call it writing. There are a lot of things that could be done with a space this free, and one of the latent temptations is to spew personal issues in their raw form out into a computer and know that people will read it. To paraphrase Nixon, the readers of The Daily Cardinal have the right to know if their columnist is a ""journal-ist."" Well, I am not a ""journal-ist."" I've buried every scent.
There's a reason that ""blog"" is such an ugly word. I've never read a single blog. The stench of desperate masturbation, of trying to reach that climax where the words are you, are out, are exorcised-it drives me away from reading one. I spout off nonsense in the course of trying to find that climax in my own writing, but I exert every emotional muscle in the effort to keep private affairs buried under something.
Sometimes what it's buried under is transparent, and like a glass blanket, it's not what I would call comfortable. When I wrote about boobs and unrequited love I kept everything general, but it was absurdly obvious that I had a crush on someone. I felt almost queasy while writing it. People might have felt queasy while reading it. Things get distorted and it's obvious what is underneath this glass blanket, but the details are blurry. Distortion scares me; people might not understand my series of words, but it is still less scary than trying to say what you feel and still not being understood. We don't know that it's really Lenin in that case, but it's more comfortable to work under the assumption that it is than it is to compare dental records.
So here's a personal story. When I met the girl whom this column would be about, we exchanged e-mail accounts before I left Scotland. What followed was more than a year of impersonal, not very conversational, often hilarious and always amusing e-mail correspondence. It was genius. I found it romantic.
It was the difference between Hemingway and novels with Fabio on the cover. It's prose that states and shows instead of tells and describes. It was not saying, ""You're smart, I like you,"" but showing it by continuing to write smart things that the other person would understand and must enjoy judging by the continued correspondence. It was a gamble that worked out, and that's where the subject matter becomes private.
Sometimes I want reverse voyeurism, perverse and impersonal nudity. I want to write something confessional. I want to say things that I mean. I want to start a blog. I want to write things that would make a voice break. I really don't want to do that at all. The subject makes me so deeply fickle and contradictory that I avoid it by dancing around it. Steve Irwin plays with cobras and crocodiles, but it's more fun to play with words and attitudes.
scavenberry@hotmail.com.
