Dear All,
I was going to write something that struck me at this moment that I actually wanted to post here.
It is about blogging. And creating things.
Let it be known that I am not the cleverest, most knowledgeable or most creative individual. But somehow in 2004 I was feeling down after a breakup and an idea that had floated around in my head for a couple of weeks became necessary to put into action. And that was that instead of indulging my misery (which I do enough anyway)- I needed to document my life’s absurdities and hilarities. Because there were enough of them that it was worthwhile enough for me to do so. And so I started a blog of “Things that amused me” at a time when blogging was about navel-gazing and LiveJournal was ugly (nothing has changed much there). It was not a public diary. It was a collection of puns, insults, jokes, farcical encounters, fictional exploits and bizarre conversations. It was a bitch-fest documenting the crazy people I knew and their absurdities. And it was kind of secret.
One day somehow the secret got out and people found out about it. I went from probably having 3 or 4 readers to in the space of a month having just over a hundred (I think). It certainly was not much by the standards of the internet and internet blogs, but it was a sizeable proportion of people I knew and had known, and random people some of whom I still have no clue actually are. And people commented and laughed at each other and posted some pretty funny stuff in response to my sometimes pretty ordinary posts.
I did not quite realise that it was probably the beginning of the end.
Eventually I found that my blog was not written for its own sake or to amuse the most important person in the world, me. Instead it had an audience, and I had to think about what I wrote and who about. Even though (as I do now) I hid identities behind some (not-so) subtle pseudonyms, I knew that people were reading and that there were consequences for being too scathing. And so “Things that amuse me” had to have, as it were, its genitalia lopped off with a scythe. Eventually I got bored.
Around that time I did also start a fictional blog with fictional thoughts in my head. It scared me how much people really did believe that sociopathic thoughts were my own. I had to stop that one for a few reasons.
Eventually life itself intervened and was less amusing. Several people I know (more than 5) turned out to be in scary and really very physically, sexually or emotionally abusive relationships. I got depressed. Someone committed suicide. Bad things happened to me. I got distracted and failed an exam in medical school. Even though I passed the supplementary exam, that minor failure managed to haunt me in future failures and fears for years afterwards. Then I started working as a doctor and all the amusing things that happened were in the hospital and thus cloaked in confidentiality. Everything that happened to me was in the hospital. I got stalked. Weird things started happening.
I lost perspective.
I stopped writing.
My intuition shut itself off.
I had this awful feeling all the time of an unreality, as if I had ceased to exist in the real world.
I lost everything at one stage. I had nowhere to live, my then-girlfriend got harassed by my stalker and dumped me, I had no job, no money and what seemed like no future.
Suffice it to say that over the next 3 years I totally kicked ass and with help from parents and friends got back on my feet.
So I am writing again. There are enough amusing things around again. I am in Sydney, not in Melbourne. I have a new job. I do not know where I am going but I know where I am. I am surrounded by “lulz”.
But this time, 7 years after I started “Things that amuse me” humour blogs are ubiquitous; notable examples include “Regretsy”, “Things bogans like”, “Hyperbole and a Half” which are by the way highly recommended, excellent and much better than anything I could come up with! Do not get me started on fictional personas on blogs– recent examples of note are “A Gay Girl in Damascus” as well as “The Real Princess Diaries” both of which are notable for their exploitative nature (the latter more so than the former).
So I guess the next question is, “Where to next?”
Yours,
Deutschy, Paving new inrails into Terra Incognita!
