downstream

Blogs have always seemed to me a little lonely somehow, so melancholy in their one-sidedness. Like a candle in a paper boat, set out in the dark water, to float downstream and disappear. A one-way transmission. Did anyone hear me?

I’ve stumbled across blogs written by people I don’t know, and they always seem too raw, too intimate, the inner thoughts of a human life spread out on the internet for anybody to see.

So I’ve hesitated to record my life this way, but I begin to think-maybe it’s simply in our nature to be lonely. Isn’t every interaction essentially one-way after all? I talk to a friend, hear her reply, hear my own thoughts, cannot hear hers. We can never completely understand each other because these crippled servants we call words incompletely communicate our selves. I can only judge your reaction by the way you look, speak, act. I can’t know how you feel, what you think.

There are many people I’ve spent parts of my life with, the sister I grew up with, waited tables with, went to college with. The husband I’ve been poor with, borne children with, and hoped with. And the children who never knew me except as a parent. But none of them, and no one, has spent my entire life with me, but me. And so the human condition, I think, is this loneliness.

But maybe-it’s possible I’ve been thinking about blogs all wrong. While I still think it’s true that a stranger’s blog is too personal for me, a friend’s blog may be a completely different animal. I have a busy busy life, and very little time for my friends, or family for that matter. But I need them so badly. Maybe a blog can function like my answer machine. I can leave a message about my daily perambulations, my friends and family can read it at their leisure, and I, likewise, can read theirs.

Maybe we can become better friends if we can hear, for once, each other’s thoughts. I’ll wait downstream for your boat, and you can catch mine.