a message to the future

I write, and in my writing is both truth-making and lie telling.
Fiction: to fabricate. To weave, to make up. To lie, with a willing audience.
To find truth through the portals of the false.
Why do I write? Why do I publish it for all to see, in this way?
Maybe because I want to be known. Maybe because I want to be trusted. Maybe because you’ve chosen to trust me.

Choosing to trust is possibly the most important decision we will make in our entire life. It renders us smaller, more incomplete, and a hell of a lot more vulnerable. Choosing trust makes skies possible when we live in a world of beginnings and endings.

I was at a wedding on Saturday night and sat with strangers. Strangers have a way of making a night magical. Beginning in anonymity and ending in a finale of future familiar faces. They were curious about me, why I liked to blog, why I blog at all. I proceeded to convince them that it’s not blogging. It’s writing. Actual, real live writing. Just in a different form. We talked about how it is like permissible voyeurism. We talked about how people try to communicate via their blogs, and whether or not that is a good thing or just a neutral bi-product of our technological age. Somehow it seems cheap or stifled to say things this way that you wouldn’t say straight to someone’s face. As in all our most impassioned declarations of the baseness of people in general, I am probably guilty of this too. I’m just glad that I have no major vendettas right now. It’s just these musings, and my new bike blog.

We throw these words to nowhere, not to be caught by pages or clasped in boxes . . .
Where will these pixels find their beauty, how will they be remembered if not bound?

I left a message to the future
Call it futile, call it vain
Call it tryin’ to cheat the hangman
Call it ego, call it aim
Left a message to the future
Maybe they’ll find it, maybe not
Past is past, past is present
Tomorrow's when it’s all and gone (-James Keelaghan)

Maybe this is all just trying to leave messages to the future. Trying to do justice to our epic lives, to our sense of being special, being set apart.In a conversation today about the psychology of journaling, a friend suggested that this writing business is really us just wanting to write ourselves into our own story. This seems plausible to me. Surrounding ourselves with those who can tell us who we are. Building up that edifice with words generated from the chaos of our experience. And on and on and on.