Last week everything changed
Dec 22, 02:58
Why is it everything important happens at the grocery store? OK not really but it seems like it at times. Anyway we were looking at the fruits and vegetables and placing strawberries in the basket alongside some apples and a tub of caramel apple dip. Then I made a clever remark about the berry growing season being over. She replied, “yeah, that’s what you said,” although I never mentioned the climatic scheduling of berry production to her. Ever. But I did write it in the last post (disclaimer: actually here, I wrote this awhile ago) and evidently she had read it previously. Weird.
I don’t know how long you’ve had a blog, but mine’s been around for a few years. Longer than it appears since I inadvertently deleted the first year of posts during a ill-advised game of musical content management systems. It was back when the site was new and exciting, and so I lost a lot of posts and proof of semi-original thinking in the disaster. Oddly, I have not yet learned my lesson.
This site has mostly been a side project of my actual life since its inception; not an alter-ego (due to a lack of commitment) but more of a continual, perpetual distraction. Most of the people reading it already know who I am, but there has been a sort of informal division between what I write on here and what I talk about with actual living people. I guess I usually write about things I don’t talk about, and generally I don’t talk about what I type. Why? I do not know. Probably because I generally sit down to post between one and three in the morning, when everyone else is doing what I ought to be and sleeping. Right now is an excellent example of this.
Back to the store. I know in retrospect it was really not a big deal, but at the time my mind melted down with this realization: making a page accessible to billions of people throughout the world using the largest communications system in existence means there is a chance someone may actually read it. This person might be known to me as a family member or a friend or a co-worker, and might read those things I’ve thought about writing involving them. Should I decide to follow through and write them. If so, will this person be offended or even recognize their role as a subject? Is name changing an option? Because I find it utterly distracting when I know name-shuffling has gone on. I always stop at the first ‘Fred’ and think the Name Changers could really do a better job and ‘John’ and ‘Susan’ are also just not going to cut it today.
At the time I was thinking this at the grocery store (still in the product section), I said I would be writing this as my next post. This is me keeping my word, only a little bit late.