DEAR FRIENDS

I used to have an online diary, then I took it down. Then I started again, and stopped, started and then stopped, and then I didn't blog for a long time. My online diary used to portray the people I knew a little and then the strange new people I met, and also the funny, or at times poignant, and often perplexing conversations we would have. Sometimes I would post email. I kept my blog, such as it was, private, or private enough, which is to say that I held it aloof from the search engines, so that anyone who wanted to read it would have to have gotten the address from someone else who knew about it, and the idea was -- there was no idea, really.

Today I begin anew, with a different mission, if not quite an idea. I used to be avid to write long emails to people, not excluding women I wanted to get to know better, and I used to watch a lot of TV and movies so as to be in touch with the times, and also because I found it a struggle to get through a book of any genre. I can no longer watch TV, and I've lost the urge to answer email other than tersely in all lower-class letters on logistical matters alone. Nothing really seems worth the effort anymore, though I sometimes trade the odd link or quip or aphorism or inappropriate confession with my old correspondents.

In my spare time -- and there is a sense in which all of my time is spare time -- I read a lot of wikipedia on subjects such as Mike Tyson, inter-species sex, and the career of Andrea Dworkin, (my current girl-crush of the moment) and updates on my favorite depraved news stories. My favorite news story from the last ten years is still the one about the schoolteacher who had a child with her 12 year old student, was released from prison after a few years under the stipulation that she not contact him on her release, immediately got herself pregnant by him again, spent a few more years in prison, and is now happily married to him.

I also try to stay in shape. I skip rope, do an ab workout, and push-ups, never as regularly as I should, just enough to slow rather than to halt or reverse the rate at which my youthful hardness diminishes into the softness and complacency of middle age. My life is a series of routines meant to hold at bay the existential torpor of a life lived in solitude, outside of any larger context, or even the illusion of such a context, of purposeful striving, historical consequence, or cultural meaning.

Dear reader, my double, my brother, my relevance to your life will exist, to the extent that it exists at all, in its total irrelevance to everything outside of its cramped and narrow self-regard. The world here will be parsed, digested, and consumed like a series of treats skewered on toothpicks and served up for you idle and sated appetite. I will go to movies, attend lectures, parties, readings, galleries, and museums, and write about them, idly, without notable expertise, and in accordance with my own somewhat perverted priorities alone. In lieu of individual relationships, which I hereby abjure, I will live my life in prose only through the medium of this blog, and of this blog alone. I make no promises to be entertaining or worthwhile, but I will never be anything other than truthful.

Follow me on this mediocre endeavor, if you dare.