Sitting here on a rented machine at Fed-Ex Kinkos on my way to meetings. Remembering what Kinkos used to be--a hum of machines and art-made-out-of-paper-in-process, a half dozen or so energetic 20-somethings feeding, collating, and boxing what was brought to them and handed over to be sanctified, all behind the counter, all by COB.
It was performance art meets business process management. It has always been my fallback job.
Sitting here today, I realize that Kinkos has become a self-service office copy-and-ship room. Two m3n in Fed-Ex polos, who I'd trust to get packages to my door fast, but not double-side-copy-collate-and-bind a family treasure or business must-haves-by-3-p.m.
Why am I on a rented PC off Highway 92?
I came here to commit wordicide.
To do myself in, before your eyes, so deeply questioning my own words, their meaning, the pieces of me that make them mean something when all you see here are pixels. Ready to blow it away.
The blogworld used to understand that human beings exist here in layers, traced back in time by archives, overlapping not just with one another, but with ourselves. I have always thought that the word "archive," and technical treatment of blog archives, severely minimize what this chronological trail of humanness is -- stretching out a half decade for some, a decade for others. My archives, they are not the library stacks of my blog. Together hey are who I have been and am. They collide and resolve. Or they don't.
In blogging, we do not get to be who we want, and we are Everything We Ever Were, at the same time. We are someone, no one, and everyone. We are the same and radically different. We are completely present and absolutely absent.
I've talked with long-time blog friends, and written here in the past, about the duality, triality, multi-ality of blogging. It is mind bending--how it can be everything, and simultaneously, nothing at all. Because we are here and we aren't. That is precisely what blogging is.
I have always operated within that context, not the one that constrains me like a straight-jacket today.
I have not hidden here. I have let you see my open wounds and have shown how cool one can look when it heals in the shape of an "S." Not so much a scar, more an sign. How many times? How many years?
My blog has no mission statement. It is neither a business nor my career. It is not a parody. It is not a reality show. It is not your sit-com. No, it is all of those things, and none.
So what stopped me? From the wordicide?
An IM intervention. A blip-bloop in the middle of Kinkos, on my way to meetings, a right-justified, 3x4 inch text box that said simply this: "Good morning. Just wanted to say, lovely writing there."
Just wanted to say, thank you.
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