Beneath blogging things move at a different pace, sometimes fast and sometimes painfully slow. It was Tom I think, somewhere, who discussed the ripeness of the space between posts, what we read in and out of that space, what it means and how we connect with one another inside the in between.
I googled his site, but couldn't find the post where he discussed this online/offline white space. Maybe I read his thoughts. Maybe we talked about it on the phone or in an email. Maybe it was another blogger. I don't know. That's the point.
As we become more than co-bloggers, as we nurture friendships through phone, packages, letters, emails, even comments--all this bing-banging around that happens between posts--subtexts then--we are becoming more than. Maybe it's not the blogging. Maybe it's the tween-blogging, the post-blogging.
In developing these online/offline friendships, some who haven't travelled that backroad--which leads to the dumpster behind the blogplaza where we share cigarettes and coffee and tears and laughs--this seems strange, odd, peculiar, even maybe cultish.
I say, you don't know. You're missing the in between.
I've absorbed some flack over the past year over this guy. I heard from more bloggers than I wanted to that I had been taken prisoner by a cult master, couldn't possibly mean what I said as I cheered him on through so many very beautiful and very ugly places, while in the mean time, I wrote about the fluidity of what we're doing here, how no single post defines who we are or what we feel into the future, which is what I find so compelling, the reason I keep on. It's the stringing together that matters. At the same time, he watched me bing-banging through some similar pretty ugly and beautiful places of my own, a story yet unfinished, restless hope keeping me company.
And in 12 months of subtext, I listened to him play the Baby Grand Blues, re-think the parts, the notes, try to figure the best melody for the story, the best cure for the melancholy, how the tune should resolve, or if it should. I added my parts and borrowed changes and riffs from him. This was the time between posts. It wasn't ripe enough to be written then. Now it is. And now he is.
So, here I am, thinking about the richness of what we've carved in offline tablets in between online posts--so many of us. As much a legacy as, more real than, and impossible to have come to without blogging.
