I really don’t have more than three gears; soul searching, funny cynical ancedotes and cryptic. Journal wise that is. I have those same three gears in real life too except that cryptic is close lipped and soul searching is tight lipped, and there are a bunch of other gears that I pop the clutch on without even realize until my chassis’ lurch. Oh, and in real life I have a reverse, journal wise I just recant, if I could I’d redact when I recanted.
This is sort of the apology for the last entry except that I’m not apologizing. Sometimes it takes me a day or two to process what I’ve said. On paper it’s processed as I type. It’s a different process of processing.
I don’t know, those of us who are still alive, I’d say that’s at least ninety percent of them what read this, 90 might be a tad liberal, have come to that state of being (aliveness) through a series of survival skills, most of which are psychological (as less than fifteen percent of the alive readers here are ninjas, hit men, game show contestants or living in a cave in Idaho eating cold pork and beans out of a can. By here I mean at this journal, for the site in general it’s still less than twenty five percent and some of that is overlap.). They become so ingrained we don’t even know we’re doing them.
I’ve said I am charming on journals all across the World Wide Web, sometimes couching it as a joke, sometimes letting it stand alone. I don’t mean that as a virtue, though it’s certainly not a vice, I mean I can be disarming. I’ve said that I’m a freak magnet; I neglect to mention that I can be disarming to make myself a surgical magnet. I’m saying this with due humility. It’s one of those survival skills. You’ve likely heard this elsewhere; information is power. If you haven’t this entry isn’t going to enlighten you, but you really should take a long hard look at what you know; information is the only power (I’m not suggesting if you don’t know shit that you’re powerless, I’m saying the ninety percent of you that are alive if you think hard enough about it don’t really need any one to explain why information is the only power).
I am disarming so people will tell me things, volunteer things, want to tell me things. It’s a lot more enlightening what people choose to tell you than how they answer direct questions. The only interesting information you ever get from a direct question is whether someone is lying or not and even that is useless because you’ve burned your ability to find out why.
I’m not being cryptic here by the way; I’m not talking about some event sideways. I’ve spent most of today saying Ow and Ouch, I’m not holding anything too deep. My knee is swollen and the bump I thought I dodged on my head has decided to go all tender and bitchy on me. I’m writing this to see if I can hold the line of a thought. That thought began with how many people I interact with digitally and how many face to face. It wandered towards how very little my has changed in the way I present myself despite how very much has changed with my need to have a way to present myself.
I forget whether a real live person or a TV person told me this, it would have been years ago; T-shirt jeans and long hair in a man means he either isn’t trying to ‘make it’ or he’s already made it so big he can do what the fuck he wants. That little pearl of wisdom says more about who said it than it does about fashion or hair and is leaving out the obvious, perhaps more obvious than the statement itself; the guy is trying to look like he either isn’t trying or has already made it.
I tell myself these days that I collect random information through being disarming because I write fiction and it’s all a kind of field testing. Truth is I don’t know why I do it, or, more alarming what triggers it. I don’t make every interaction an intel gathering. To my digital friends I don’t even do it at all. It’s part of what is so compelling about being an online person.
Ouch, sorry. Head hurts. I’ve got to remember to turn on lights in the middle of the night.
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