Gimme your body
Gimme your mind
Open your heart
Pull down the blind

Gimme your love gimme it all
Gimme in the kitchen gimme in the hall

Art for arts sake
Money for Gods sake
Art for Arts sake
Money for Gods sake

I had one of those weekends where I think about killing off my blog, because I am in a place where rage and pain and frustration mount, and I can’t seem to use the one therapy available to me — writing.

This is where a private journal is better; yet I seem unable to write without an audience. As much as I belive in art for art’s sake I can’t seem to practice it, I need to send my words off to someone to have them worth saying.

Blogging is a double-edged sword. We send our words into the vast semi-permenant public record that is the internet, but eventually, we all must deal with the fact that from the click of the ‘publish’ button, our thoughts and deeds are public, and can, possibly, be tracked back. Even anonymous bloggers know this; look at Waiter Rant, who had to take his ‘tip jar’ down because it might compromise his anonymity.

Those of us who blog under a known name, real or trackable back to us, invariably confront the fact that people we know may read us. Family, friends, work, parents.

My mother reads this space. Eventually, my daughter will find it, as soon as she gets bored googling up obscure playmobile toys and decides to google daddy.

The audience constrains us. Things I might say, behind a curtain of anonymity with no names or dates, now, ever and always, I must think about. Who might this hurt? Is this someone’s secret? Am I free to speak? And this becomes a spiral, tighter and tighter, til sometimes I cannot move my fingers, trapped in some fugue state, paralyzed by thought and unable to create.

Days like this, I think, shut it down, it’s past it’s expiration date.

Fortunately, when I think this, I don’t reach for the delete key. At best I think ‘take it down’ and move the published files aside. The database that contains all this work, and that of other bloggers, is safe, and backed up. So if I again succumb to the desire to make it go away, the few ounces of treasure in all this won’t cease to be.

But I stare at ecto‘s compose window, more and more as time goes by, with empty, impotent frustration, my words filtered down to nothing. I post links and pictures and funny quips, meaningless film reviews, because I feel I must say something.

Mute frustration rules my life in many ways. Words I cannot speak. My words become the match that ignites a tinderbox of trouble. Yet words are the life-blood of me, my interface to the world, my only effective tool to understand the universe. I think in language. I often think in dialog.

I am trapped in my own head, unable to break free, the tools that helped now, I fear, hurt. There is so much I want to say, and so little I can.