Perils of blogging.

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I recently logged over 100 entries, covering several years of my life, so a little soul-searching is appropriate. And, of course, I need a place to put this quality photo at right of Matthew Lesko.

People know that I blog.

This isn’t a problem. I actually tell people I blog in the hopes that they’ll read my writing and give me feedback. I started blogging because I needed an exercise that forced me to write regularly, and it’s worked gret for me.

But I find the lack of distance between what I write and my life to be a little too close. It hasn’t been thrown in my face yet; I’ve not been stalked, and my subject matter has been relatively low-key. (“In retrospect, he should have asked her if she had an STD before he invested a month trying to bed her. His sexual frustration felt like a taut violin string, and he couldn’t figure out why she was affectionate, but never sexual. They slept in the same bed, they necked, and spent every hour together when they weren’t working. Months later, when Celinda told him she’d contracted an STD when her boyfriend cheated on her with this same woman, did he realize he dodged a bullet that month.”)
I view my life as the greatest free source for writing material ever created. A quick scan of my bookshelf reveals a penchant for a reality far stranger than anything I could make up.

However not everyone around me wants to be a subject of public scrutiny. Although they haven’t said it, it’s only a matter of time before my friends and my family start conversations with, “Now I don’t want to see this on your website, but I need to talk to you …”

Eventually, they will stop confiding in me altogether.

I’m not the first one to discover this; writers have dealt with this for years, and since blogging hatched, it’s reached media awareness. But it was when my favorite blogger complained about it, and then I came to this funeral, that I decided to add a little distance.

So, assume some of these names are made up to protect the innocent, but that all the stories are true. They just didn’t all happen to me.

Enjoy.