If you didn't get it from my first post, this is going to be a teenage blog. Which I've always thought means very little, because I possess weirder interests than any adult that I know, and probably bigger ambitions too. Below is me writing about starting another blog, a fourth one, and me trying to answer I imagine the only question you'd have for me which is "why? I mean, y'know, after no one read the first three?".
I've found it's not just on blogger where every few months I pack up and change things. Every now and again I need a new hair style, or I'll look in the mirror to pick a new thing to hate about my face for the next few months. Which is all crazy, I know, because I look at old things I wrote, not even old, just a few months back, and I think it's good. It's not holy-shit-is-this-James-Joyce's-long-lost-writing type good, but it's a lot better than I thought when I wrote it. It's like I can't like something openly or enjoy a part of myself without some distance. It's a problem. But the calendar just reset and here's the time for making amends, this time to myself. I used to only see the vulgar side in loving yourself, but now I see there is really something to it. You either have to be really stupid or deluded into thinking you're good enough to love, or you've been through enough hating yourself that you're smart enough to know that loving yourself is a good idea. It's as healing as medicine or love. So that's my New Year's resolution, to stop asking for something more, or something different.
I remember this brilliant Lou Reed quote that some publications wheeled out when Reed died. It's about art, but like anything worthwhile in art it's really about you and me and everybody:
“All through this, I’ve always thought that if you thought of all of it as a book then you have the Great American Novel, every record as a chapter. They’re all in chronological order. You take the whole thing, stack it and listen to it in order, there’s my Great American Novel.”Reed was such a messy artist. He has big masterpieces, like Transformer and his Velvet Underground work, yet he had screw ups too (just listen to something from the 90s) and he had weird stuff (he ended things with a Metallica collaboration). One discography that holds Berlin, Metal Machine Music and Sally Can't Dance. There's this myth about this "Great American Novel", or this perfect image of yourself and your life in your head, about it being perfect and cleaned up exactly as you like it. But really it's messy and weird. It just takes a long time to realize that those are the good parts.
You only focus on the bad parts of yourself but when all is said and done everybody else only remembers the good parts - and hopefully the weird, fucked up, oddball parts too. So this post was really about life and letting myself act like more of an idiot than I ever allow, but it's about blogging too and the fact that I'm hopefully going to write some good stuff here, but inevitably some shit stuff too, and stuff that won't really make much sense, but that hopefully in a year's time I'll be confident in myself enough to like it anyway and not scrap this blog for another one and put more impossible expectations into a blank canvas. Because as much as no-one ever complains about a blank canvas (even though they should) it's certainly not as good as one with some colour to it.
No comments:
Post a Comment