Okay, you want to hear a sad story? Last night I was home, listening to an album. A favorite song came on, and I was singing aloud, loud enough for it to matter but not loud enough to wake up Toph, sleeping in his bedroom adjacent, and I was singing, I was moving my hands through my hair in a weird obsessive sort of way, like a slow-motion shampooing maneuver--it's something I do with my hair when I am alone and enjoying music--and as I as singing and doing the slo-mo hands-in-hair maneuver, I messed up the words to the song I was singing, and though it was two fifty-one in the morning, I became quickly, deeply embarassed about my singing gaffe, convinced that there was a very good chance that someone could see me--through the window, across the dark, across the street. I was sure, saw vividly that someone--or more likely a someone and his friend--over there was having a hearty laugh at my expense.

Oh please. What would a brain do if not these sort of exercises? I have no idea how people function without near-constant internal chaos. I'd lose my mind.

All what?

What am I giving you? I am giving you nothing. I am giving you things that God knows, everyone knows. They are famous in their deaths. This will be my memorial to them. I give you all these things, I tell you about his legs and her wigs--I do so later in this section--and relate my wondering if I should be having sex with my girlfriend in front of their closet the night of my father's service, but after all that, what, in the end, have I given you? It seems like you know something, but you still know nothing. I tell you and it evaporates. I don't care--how could I care? I tell you how many people I have slept with (thirty-two), or how my parents left this world, and what have I really given you? Nothing. I can tell you the names of my friends, their phone numbers, but what do you have? You have nothing. They all granted permission. Why is that? Because you have nothing, you have some phone numbers. It seems precious for one, tow seconds. You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me. I give you virtually everything I have. I give you all of the best things I have, and while these things are things that I like, memories that I treasure, good or bad, like the pictures of my family on my walls I can show them to you without diminishing them. I can afford to give you everything. We gasp at the wretches on afternoon shows who reveal their hideous secrets in front of millions of similarly wretched viewers, and yet... what have we taken from them, what have they given us? Nothing. We know that Janine had sex with her daughter's boyfriend, but... then what? We will die and we will have protected... what? Protected from all the world that, what, we do this or that, that are our arms have made these movements and our mouths these sounds? Please. We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, like, say, masturbatory habits (for me, about once a day, usually in the shower), we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our pasts and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes on less of oneself. But it's just the opposite, more is more is more--more bleeding, more giving. These things, details, stories, whatever, are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see. What does he care where it is, who sees it, this snake, his skin? He leaves it where he molts. Hours, days or months later, we come across a snake's long-shed skin and we know something of the snake, we know that it's of the approximate girth and the approximate length, but we know very little else. Do we know where the snake is now? What the snake is thinking now? No. By now the snake could be wearing fur; the snake could be selling pencils in Hanoi. The skin is no longer his, he wore it because it grew from him, but then it dried and slipped off and he and everyone could look at it.

Something that has come up a few times during this reunion tour (yes, dear reader, this officially marks the point when I begin devouring other people's blogs for content; you have been warned) is deleted blogs. Deleted blogs are nothing new, people have been deleting their blogs for almost as long as they've had them. But it's still a funny thing, and I haven't given it a lot of thought, so I'm going to do that now.

I understand why someone would want to delete their blog. I've spent the last three days talking about how my blog is practically a shrine to teenage negativity. It's full of bad memories, simply put. But it's not the only account of my time in high school. There are other blogs that describe events I was a part of, and of course, there are other people as well, including myself. If this blog were gone, I might be able to forget about my the way things were as I wrote about them, but those things would still be there, out in the rest of the world.  If I were to delete this blog, there would be one less version of my past out there.

But hey, this version is pretty important, right? Even if someone gives a description of these events that doesn't match up with my own, I could always ignore them if I had my blog. I could point to an entry and say "nuh-uh, fuck you, you weren't there, you didn't know what I was going through"... any number of things. Having this blog helps me stay attached to my own version of things, they way I saw them back then.

Where does that leave us? Pros and cons. Pros: If I keep this blog, I will remember. Cons: If I keep this blog, I will remember. Same difference either way. But it's not necessarily bad. My past is like anyone's past: varied and confused. Full of good stuff and bad stuff. But it's mine, and I wouldn't be me without it. Wow, that sounds dumb. And yet... it's still true.

So, no matter what I may have vaguely threatened at the end of my most recent Kanye-centric Month of Blogging I'm not going to delete this blog. But other people still delete theirs. And there's nothing wrong with that. Like I said, my past is my past, it's not anyone else's past. Other people may have things in their blogs that they want to get rid of, or have to get rid of. It takes a lot to be free, and sometimes you have to do things like deleting your blog. And hey, who says you can't be free?

1) Anytime someone recounts past events, they recount them from their own perspective, usually portraying themselves in a more reasonable or sympathetic light than the people/things around them. It's hardly a new observation to say that every memory is a lie we tell ourselves, but it's something that fascinates me. 

2) More specifically, I wanted to discuss that first principle in regards to my blog. Particularly the story of my sophomore year of high school as told by my blog. Reading the entries for September '04-June or July '05, I found that they told an extremely skewed version of the events. The story of sophomore year as told by my blog is the story of a young man, lonely but full of idealism and hope, reaching out to the people around him. Those people, through careless or outright malice, betray him and leave him crippled, despondent, and emotionally inaccessible. 

This is inaccurate, though if you proposed that as a summary to me around May of 2005, I probably would have approved. What can I say? I was stupid. I was fifteen years old. Cut me a little slack. 

The point is, on the whole, my blog gives a very limited view of my life. I'm not concerned about that for your sake (you, the reader); if you read this you probably know there's more to me than the bitter asshole side that comes out in my journal entries. I'm worried for myself. When me and my roommates were reading our old blogs, I came away from mine with the impression that I was constantly sad during high school. That feeling sort of hung over me for a few days, and I even started believing it was true. 

But it's not. High school is, as everyone who's been through it knows, a lot of things. And a lot of those things are bad. Not all of them, though. The reason I get such a negative vibe from these old entries is because I blogged mainly for negative reasons; I wanted attention, I wanted everyone to know how sad I was, I was indirectly communicating with someone because I lacked the ability and the courage to confront them directly... take your pick. In short: I wasn't sad all of the time, but I only blogged when I was sad.

But then again, who knows? Maybe it wasn't my fault. Maybe it was something deeper, something fully imbedded into the core of this site. The impetus for a lot of people (in my social circle) joining Mindsay was, after all, a petty high-school fight. Maybe that ugly, childish incident left a stain on the site itself. Maybe Mindsay is haunted, like some virtual Overlook Hotel, by the violent sins of the past, and it compels the troubled teen Jack Torrances of the world (me!) to madness. Sheer madness. The kind of madness that twists reality and distorts everything around you, so that you can no longer tell the truth from the lie. The kind of madness that turns brother against brother, man against kin. Beast against beast. The kind of madness that wakes up at four o' clock in the morning, screaming and covered in sweat, all alone. The kind of madness so horrifyingly unknowable that to even glimpse upon the face of it would leave you twisted and scarred. The kind of madness, in short... that can drive a man mad.

You know, something like that.