I’m really not feeling like blogging so bear with me.
Early on, there were no social contracts for blogging. In fact, nobody knew what it was. It was the Wild West. The internet was unknown. Porn and a few sites here and there.
I started blogging very early on. Around 2000. Had a bit on earlier than that, frankly. Nobody read them. But it was something to do. And I was lonely. I remember I had broken some unsaid contract because half a dozen times I tried to meet someone online I’d share my blog a they’d accused me of being a narcissist. Because who does that? Who publishes their journal, their diary, online? I was ahead of my time. I knew that at the time. Oddly enough (for me) I didn’t push. I didn’t explain. I knew they were the kinds of people I didn’t want to know, the kind of girl I wasn’t ever going to date.
Then it became normal. I hated the term “blogging” (I preferred the term “online journal”). The year 2000 came and went and everyone was doing it and nobody knew what it was but they were all doing it. And the social norms changed.
I used to have a lot of people reading my “blog”. As a result of being able to track who came to my site, I could see generally who and when. And what I saw sometimes tended towards the disturbing. It was almost always people I knew. Okay, no biggie. I love the people I knew. But then, over the years, I began to recognize it was also the same people that wanted to somehow control me, have power over me.
People trying to enforce some kind of social contract.
I still have a post I wrote one evening. Well, I wrote it over several days. My then roommate had gifted a vinerial disease to someone else. Unprotected sex while knowing she had said disease. And my then girlfriend wasn’t having it. I thought there was a clear cut solution to this problem: we’d all get together like adults and talk about it. But no. Everyone hid in the alcoves. We didn’t talk. As a result my life went to shit. I tried and tried to get people to talk but they didn’t. So I wrote a long blog about it, suggesting possible solutions. Result? Threat of a law suit. It wouldn’t have held. I knew it then. Nothing I posted wasn’t true, wasn’t protected by the first amendment and every other legal code. But I took that post down after anger from one of my few readers slash friends slash people checking up on me but not having an adult conversation with me.
New rule: Don’t discuss touchy realities online regardless of how true they are.
Nowadays you have to be even more careful. For example, I’ve never talked about work online. I know better. It’s one thing to have a “friend” threaten you over their own bullshit, it’s another for a multi-million dollar company to come after you. So, the two times I’ve been fired for having Lyme, I’ve never blogged about it. Not once. I’m not an idiot. I’m not going to endanger my chance at my next job. I’m not going to go against companies that have GOOD lawyers go against me when I have none, especially in a country where I’m not allowed to gather solid evidence against a company for firing me for bullshit reasons.
I’m sure that’s going to be the subject of a future post.
That’s it for now.
I’d really like to have sex but that’s not going to happen.
Lenny Bruce’s biography is good. Don’t find it funny. He just seems to be on a monologue about stuff no one but people who don’t understand reality are ready and willing to get offended by, then or now.