It's a sick, dumb comfort, but it's all I know.

Hoping to death and beyond that anyone cares as much as I do about saying goodbye to the ocean. Wanting to be one of the the tiny sea waves in the harsh wind that is swept from the sand, into the oblivion of the Pacific.

--------------------------------------------------

[AN ASIDE]

I look at your pictures, at your words, every day. I analyze them and search for effigies of myself, hoping still to find remorse in your voice, hoping to find the flint glint of me that I've convinced myself you stole from me. But in the space and time between then and now, some strange mellowing has happened; your words/writing have become familiar to be, non-dangerous, friendly even. I know the rythm of your prose, the patterns of your cover-ups, your trends towards indecipherable garble (in good times), and honest clarity (in bad times). I say this only to the sea foam ether, but I enjoy your work.

--------------------------------------------------

It is a hard truth to admit that I am lonelier as I grow older. In spite of having a loving (if pessimistic) partner, in spite of a thriving life, I feel the beginning of that black-rock loneliness that we have all heard about; I wonder how much further it will go, and how much it will affect everything that I presently have in my life. I am thirty-one years old, and there is still so much craziness that lay ahead.

We watched 'Synechdoche, NY' the other day (when I was home sick for the afternoon), and it fucked me up. I didn't particularly like the movie, but it brought up all the terrifying realities of being a human being who just keeps on going. The things that end up being our constants are never the things we expect; the partner, the house, the school, the job, the parents... they are not, I think, what end up being the threads we produce our life from.

My threads are, so far, frayed phantom limbs, just beginning to unclench.

It's late Thursday night, the M and I are several hours returned from our day-long sojourn to the Oregon Coast. I had the notion that a run around the Three Capes scenic loop would knock me out of my stress-induced Life Stupor.

I am feeling Very Serious these days.

I'm off of Facebook. Going on one week now. If you know, you know. If you've never had a problem with the addictive nature of online social networking and you think I'm weak/weird, then fuck you and stop reading my blog.

It's hard... I see old pictures that I'm in, but now I'm not tagged, my comments are removed; a ghost. A ghost dyke as a central figure in a chaotic portrait of queer PDX life in 2010, and I'm Not Really There. So strange. So needing to get used to it.

What does it feel like to reclaim privacy? What do I give up/sacrifice in the process?

Will I know what to do with myself once I've grown accustomed to a world where I don't worry about what 500 people think of my thrice-hourly status updates? Will I remember how to function in one-on-one social interactions again? Already, everything seems more fascinating and overwhelming to me, just in one week of being 'off it'. Like I'm hearing people talking about how genuinely interesting they are for the first time, not just tuning in for whatever sound bites I can pilfer and post for later. Not storing up quips and social fodder for the sake of accomplishing vague witticisms online... but seeing the people I interact with. Being able to consider my reactions, interactions, and judgments for a moment longer, and in real time. Knowing that I have all the phone numbers and emails I'll ever need, and that I will be fine.

We went to a reading this evening of a book about the Riot Grrrl movement, written as a dissertation by a woman who, admittedly, did much of her interviewing & research through Facebook connections. She stood at the front of the room, her advance already cashed & spent, and told the audience that if people weren't on Facebook, they most likely were not in her book.

That got me excited. Excited to think that, yes, there are feminist hermits out there, people who this twee doctoral researcher was too lazy to get to, who are off the grid doing God-Knows-What and harvesting turnips. And I Love Them, they inspire me, and I quest for that place. Where we can claim our power to say NO. NO, I am not part of this mad world, I will not be caught up in the dissolution of my own creativity, I will go out and hunt for the authentic, the pure, the difficult.

So say I, writer of a blog read by no one!