Not All Who Wander Are Lost

My name is boyhowdy, and I have a transparent pseudonym.

Yeah, I posted my true wikiname in the previous entry. No, I won't go back. Why change the past when it is yours to embrace? Let the archival cache of the internet, the worlds largest unforgetting elephant, recouple first and second self.

A little research and a bit of close attention to context cues wil bring you to the meat-me, now short of hair but a bit longer of breath since last week's bout with asthmatic bronchitis and the doctor's subsequent mandate for sudden smoking cessation. Yes, me in all my glory: rediscovered by old friends using only the most obvious of keywords no less than thrice a week, on average.

There have been times -- o, many times indeed -- when I would not scream what I would write, would not stand by my words in a crowd. To realize that, as time moves ever onwards, I find myself trustworthy enough to allow myself to be found is without price.

The only problem is that some secrets are not ours to share. In a connected life, some risks cannot be isolated unto the self. Ironically, in a lifetime of wandering, more public means more taboos, content-wise.

And more taboos means a bit less life on the blogblock.

Blog about work? Only if you're willing to stand by your opinion in the potential face of willful parental misinterpretation, and risk family hearth to do so. Blog about the known personal problems of family and friends, however pseudonymic? Only if you accept that their arrival herein could reopen thinskin wounds, regardless of intent.

My parents drop in and watch my brain tick. My wife reads the blog and corrects my embellishments. My pre-literate daughters, in some ways the most important, most intentional of my once-and-future readership, should not have to see my heart and head in anger anywhere, even here.

Symptomatically speaking, for those of us that blog eclectically -- specificially, allowing the personal to intermingle with the professional and vocational -- it's a disconnected life that remains fully public. Unless you're heartless, I suppose. Or have guts I neither want nor afford.

In some ways, it's wonderful to realize that I've placed so much of my life off-limits and off-line. It means (I think) that I'm truly blogging for those close as well as half-imagined, that I blog with love for those I know, and that they visit to recieve it.

And so I take it as a sign of my growing closeness to family and friends that I not only have chosen to protect more of them, but have more of them to protect in the first place, as time goes along.

Sometimes it means more silence. But a little introspection never harmed the psyche in the long run.

And the world remains as rich as ever, ripe for wandering, sweet with wonder. As long as there is you and I, there will always be a blog. Though it may not contain as much of my heart as it once did, there is heart here aplenty, and it is good.

And the rest of the heart? Let's just say it's where it belongs. Another wonder. Another literacy. Another piece of the infinite self.

Let us remember not to treat the blog as the self, for there is always more than words to offer. And silence is, in truth, oft golden.

For my family and friends -- you know who you are.

Comments:

dude, why do you have mrs_fezziwig still linked in yer blog section and you still haven't linked mine?!? argh...

# posted by

Shaw Israel Izikson : 9:42 PM, January 19, 2006

nice blog, I read alot of it.. if you get a chance please come read mine... Sports Chat

Thanks hope to see you there!

# posted by

Anonymous : 9:49 PM, January 19, 2006

Shaw: I have no link to your blog because I'm trying to protect your secrets. Jeez, didn't you RTFB?

# posted by

boyhowdy : 9:59 PM, January 19, 2006

ahhh - yas - secrets...

seriously though, there is a REAL link from a REAL person that you might REALLY want to put on your page:
http://www.quitmeter.com/

# posted by

Shaw Israel Izikson : 12:45 AM, January 20, 2006