February 05, 2002

Bathing in Bombast

There is a lot to love about The Bombast Transcripts. Chris Locke's brilliant mind, incredible gift for story telling, mixed with his often damn-scary use of idea enhancing self medications, make for a wild ride through the worlds of business, art, love, loss, grief, and discovery. And I'm only half way through it.

What's taking so long? I've been re-reading a lot as I go along. It's a good idea to do this when you're reading Locke. Take any special passage--and there are a lot of them: The first read startles you, the second read brings forth an "Ah ha" (and often a "ha ha"). And the third read is special--it's for soaking in his ideas.

Here's one of my favorites, from page 72:

"What I believe about my writing -- sometimes, when it's not just flatulent exhibitionism -- is that it's a way to turn those headlights on myself. Not to shock anyone, but to cease ignoring, fearing, hating what I am. After half a lifetime doing that, one day fourteen years ago I stopped. And right before I stopped, I got truly angry. It wasn't anger born of fear, for once, but of understanding. Understanding how I'd been complicit with whatever it is we go along with, buy into, lay on ourselves and others constantly: the shameful guilty knowledge that we are licking our own secret wound in private, in the dark, and no one must ever see. No one must ever know."

This is what I've been doing with my blog. And perhaps what many of us bloggers are doing--turning the headlights on ourselves so we can start healing. Start living again, at first within the safety and almost-anonymity of the net. Here we can examine. We can practice. And we can fail.

We start again. We test the waters. Who am I now? And who might care? Start to reveal the wounds. *Speak* the pain. And when the message connects with someone, resonates with them, that very connection begins the heaing. The growing. The becoming.

In this process, I've had gut wrenching moments. Why is it all coming back to me now? Taking me on this personal oddessy? Converging and climaxing around painful memories and a present-tense that feels uncertain? Why is it all at once so painful and so thrilling? And why the hell am I so compelled to share it?

Because it is birth.

Creation, birth, rebirth. It's bloody and painful, it pushes you to the edge and jabs at you until you think it might be better to jump than to take the punishment a second longer. That's what I'm here to do, to give birth to myself, and to maybe do a few things better this time around. Here. With you.