C I P R I A N I

I travelled at the beginning of the month and spent the rest of the month in preparation for a possible job.  But that preparation is a shabby excuse for not writing here.

I don’t really know how bad my depression is from a clinical standpoint. I know I get the blues, but I also know that everyone gets the blues.  But I do find myself in dark places sometimes and that occasionally makes it harder to function effectively, or at least as highly as I’d like to.  That’s all I really want to say about that right now, other than that there is a fog.  Sometimes the fog lifts, sometimes I have to fight out of it.  At times, June was a bit foggy.  

I don’t want to over-dramatize.  I can function.  It’s not as bad as all that.  Multi-tasking is another story.  I’ve been trying for years to decipher how many projects I can truly work on at a time and the answer really comes down to this: it depends on my mood.  Sustaining focus, like all things, takes practice and so with that, back to practice:

What if everyone on Twitter was lying?  What if all the status updates on Facebook were bullshit?  What if these people weren’t “at the gym”?  They were not “enjoying their Sunday with family”?  What if, in fact, they “hated the movie” or the vichyssoise at the particular restaurant was terrible?  That they weren’t “laughing out loud” or “rolling on the floor laughing their ass off”?

I don’t claim this is the case all the time.  I don’t think there is a large contingency of people lying about where there are, but I bet more than a few are fooling about how they feel.  And I’m certain most folks aren’t laughing out loud or rolling around on the floor.  Hell, who knows?  Maybe a few folks are saying they’re “at the club” when they’re in fact, on their couch.  Alone.

I was reading about the ingenuity of Twitter this morning in Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From, and in fact have just started “tweeting” myself, and this little thought about lying on Twitter occurred to me.  It’s not a brilliant idea and I’m certainly not the first to have it.  It’s not an idea for a movie or a story – Though perhaps it would be useful as clue.  Could one use it as an alibi?

Probably not admissable.  

Anyway, it was simply a question I thought about exploring here and I started looking for a pen to jot it down next to the other ideas that were accumulating…

And that’s how it happens.  The accumulation.

God knows, I have a lot of catching up to do in just about every aspect of my life, but it dawned on me that I should simply just write about it now, even though I intended on starting back here with some thoughts from last month. Best laid plans…

So now that that’s done, I can move with no segue at all to Rachel Maddow, another unintentional thing, but since it’s been on my mind too thinking about this blog and what I haven’t written the past month…  

In my entries a few months back on MSNBC, I made some remark about Ms. Maddow in a hard hat and I have to say, while probably harmless, for whatever reason, lately I’ve been feeling kind of bad about it.  Now, I don’t know her.  I’m a fan and respect her, and I’m certain she doesn’t read this blog because I don’t think anyone reads this blog.  But while I don’t think I said anything extremely insulting in that entry, I did kinda make fun of the hard hat. That wasn’t my point in the entry, but I was sort of making fun of something very surface.

Of course, I didn’t mean anything by it, and I’m perhaps overblowing it just a little to make a point.  Or rather, a connection.  

I started thinking about image and all the little details that inform it.  Who are we really?  From public figures like politicians and celebrities to us – those “tweeting” and those not, who are we really?

A few days ago, around the same time Tom Cruise got his divorce, I flipped through the pages of my Rolling Stone, and read an article about – you guessed it – Rachel Maddow.  The piece included a high school photo of a blonde Rachel.  Now what does a Blonde Rachel Maddow years ago in high school have to do with a recently divorced from Katie Holmes Tom Cruise?  I don’t know.  I leave that to you. 

Johnson speaks of “platforms” in his book which Steve Denning of Forbes describes as “putting together components that are not unique but which when recombined can create something that enables many others to create something new.”  Johnson uses Twitter as an example.

Changing the color of our hair, who we marry, what we tweet, read – or what we don’t because we can’t find the motivation or are too busy, too in love, too lazy, is all this stuff just components on a platform?  Do we just grow?  Do we change?  Obviously no two people are alike, no two images are a like, some people are more genuine than others, but everyone has private and public lives.  Perhaps the contrasts aren’t as stark in some cases, but are any of us ever “all” of us, all at once?  And if we are, what is that?  

Who are we really and what happens when we just be?  

Well, a man’s gotta eat, right?  One can’t simply “be” and come upon food.  One must get dressed and hunt or at least go to the store.  Polite society doesn’t let us pick up groceries naked, so there’s more than a thin arguement that says the moment we slip on clothes, we’re a little less than “us” – even if those clothes now days say something about “who we are”.

Say what you will, but there’s a fine line between being and dying.  I guess that line is balance.  

All the stuff, the clothes on our back to the words on our blogs all make up us -and yet, I don’t know seems something’s still missing.

Now, clearly after mulling through this all-over-the-place-passage, it becomes apparent that quite a few ideas were tangled up inside my brain and I still haven’t covered any of the stuff from the notes yet.  Unfortunately, as much as I would have liked this passage to have landed like the second side of Abbey Road, it just didn’t.  But that really wasn’t the point.  The point this morning wasn’t to be good, it was to get started again.  

Besides, I’ve got to get dressed and eat breakfast.