Life, Reinvented

By writing all this personal information and posting it online, what am I giving you?  I am giving you nothing.  If there is a God, (s)he knows the details; everyone who was there knows.  Maybe what I say will be my memorial to myself.  I hand out all these things; I tell about this or that person.  Sex, drugs, and rock n roll (to steal a shitty metaphor), but in the end of it all, what have I given away?  It seems like you know something, but you still know nothing.  It’s all in the abstract.  I can tell everything or nothing.  I can lie or tell the truth.  Those who know, know; and those who don’t … well, it hardly matters, does it?

                I could talk about disappointing my parents, or disappointing my own children with disaffected behavior.  I could talk about rampant sexual exploits, could get the permission of everyone in my life, tell all the sordid stories.  Hell, I could post their phone numbers and addresses online, but what do you have?  Nothing real.  Just abstract words about a feeling or a place or fight or a high.  Nothing we can collectively touch.  Past tense is done; none of it can break me any more than I’ve already been broken.  Things are diminished only by time, not by retelling. 

                We identify our secrets, our pasts, our bad habits, our identities; but none of it really matters.  The more we say, the less it has an effect.  More bleeding, more shedding of the skin.  By the time others see the skin which has been shed, the snake is miles away.  It’s growing and moving in a different direction.  We think we can know something about the snake by looking at what it has left behind.  Maybe. 

                I want everyone to witness my youth.  I would watch reruns of it on late-night tv, occasionally, if it was On Demand.  I wonder if I would get lost in it again.  Maybe not.  Once was enough.  But it was glorious, as youth always is.  But putting it on tv would flatten all the depth and nuance from the people in my stories.  They need to stay original and unprecedented and extraordinary.  It might sound irritating in retrospect. 

                I’ll reinvent my youth.  Make every day a world-clearing sort of revolution, a bloodless one, one more interested in regeneration than any sort of destruction.  Every day a fresh start.  Automatic.  Instantaneous.  Every day a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. 

                                                                  (thank you, Dave.  You inspire me.)