I'm closing this blog, or at least the main column. It's no longer doing anything I need it to. This started as a place to write things that I didn't want to have to rewrite time after time for everyone I knew. Then it sort of turned into a place to testify. I've also conceived of it as an audition piece for writing someplace else; all in all, that's a mixed burden.

It has always been pretty personal, because that's how I work; in the last year, with a few scares about employers seeing the site, it has been harder to be personal and frank. It is also hard to know that there are people reading the site who I do not want to reveal myself to. I don't mean the general public -- I am generally an exhibitionist -- I mean people I know whose feelings about me I do not trust.

A number of my friends have blogs that are all news or all intellect; largely impersonal. Most of them are guys. I don't think they and others have realized what it has done when they have said to me "I could never post the kind of things you write" in a concerned tone of voice. It has pressed down the lid of this outlet.

There was a time in college when I realized that the poetry and essays I had been writing since high school were mostly just a form of therapy. Trying to harness this therapy for class assignments was ultimately harmful not just to my work, but to me. Writing for this blog has become problematic. This is a performance space. I have to entertain. I'm hobbled by my poor understanding of libel law and of the way others see me. I have developed a tone which is sometimes omniscient, more frequently just pretentious; sometimes nostalgic, sometimes hysterical, often preachy; and I hate it. It's not human. There is no room in it for flaws. I can't be as uninhibited as the illiterate teenagers whose blogs I look down on, and knowing my inhibitions and scorn at once makes me hate myself.

It is really hard to put this blog down. I've always been proud of the title Dancing Sausage; I'm glad I don't have a blog named after something someone else wrote. I want to be open. I want people to know what's going on. I love being an exhibitionist, really; I always have. But I'm finding that I come home on a given evening and think about how I can package my life for this space, and that just doesn't do me any good.

Something will still be here; in fact, it may not look like much of anything has changed, since the right-hand column is still going at a fair clip. But I'm closing the site to myself, in hopes I'll sit down with a blank book instead, and try writing sense out of myself, for myself, the way I used to. Posted by Gus at May 09, 2003 02:49 AM | TrackBack