So Many Thoughts, So Little Time II (continued from last post)

I wrote to my friend in South Carolina: My father used to
say that my mother was afraid of losing her looks. Well, she never
did. But now I'm afraid of losing my looks. I'm thinking, I need to
develop emotional fortitude, healthy thoughts and wisdom as a safe
landing surface in case I don't end up as lucky as Mom.



I wrote to my Mother: I noticed with surprise how emotionally stable I was going into my period this time around. I'm like, "Wow, I'm bleeding. But I don't
remember suffering." Even waiting at a bus stop for most of an hour
yesterday I marvelled at how good I felt and realized how fortunate I
was to be stranded in a good mood instead of a bad one.



I wrote to a local friend: [edited for blog] Apparently, most of my old friends from the East don't read my blog at all, which is, I admit, understandable. Even this guy here in Seattle [identifying text omitted] doesn't seem to read it. He sends me these really short messages saying, "how are you doing?" or "What have you been up to?" or some such... And yet, even this is kind of understandable. I mean, I can't promise my blog will always be good. (You have to give yourself permission to be up and down.) And I haven't totally caught up with everybody else's blogs. (At least I read them, though.)

But nobody wants to be this lonely, so I've begun to hatch a plan. It will bear some explanation, but I might as well start trying to articulate it...

Well, to start with, you know the feeling you get when you're a little tyke (4,5,6,7 years old) and you just wrote a story (or created something personally expressive.) You want some grownup to read it, so you pester them until they do. But just when they're about to read it you realize that your creation is in trouble -- somebody's about to read it just because you wouldn't take no for an answer. Somebody is not going to appreciate your creation. And worse, this unworthy audience is going to see right through your urgency to have your story read, right through everything you have written, to a part of you that you no longer want to share with them. You start to feel sheepish about the whole thing and want to hide your precious story.

Well, grownups feel that way too, so I'm not going to give people the hard sell on my blog while I'm alive. It's statistically likely that somebody I know -- maybe even someone I know already today -- will survive me. And everybody gets a little bit popular at the time they die. So I'm getting my will together and asking the survivors among my friends to (a) share any actual money I might have with my family (sorry, not the house! that's for the neices;) and (b) read my blog. People will be curious about me at that moment. At that time it will not be a hard sell. It will not be too much to ask of anybody. I will not feel sheepish in an urn of ashes, like a child who just begged some grownup to read his story. I'm not even sure I feel sheepish about it just imagining it from the present time. So that is the way I will go.