All this talk of quitting isn’t about quitting. An e-mail from a friend put it well: It was a liberating thought, like, “yeah, I don’t have to be tied to this, if I don’t want.” Which in turn frees me to show up at DogPoet in whatever way I want, and if it’s about kicking out awful rough drafts full of late-night musings instead of time-crafted stories of love and loss for awhile, well damnit it’s my DogPoet, man. I get to make up the rules here. And all my rules right now start with “Do”, not “Don’t”. I’m glad a few of you can still hang with that.
I remember the first time a blogger I read called it quits. I remember thinking “God, I can’t do that. DogPoet is who I am right now.” It reminds me of that scene in Madonna’s Truth or Dare (shut up, queens) where she’s backstage after a concert and Warren Beatty is trying to have a private conversation with her and she won’t let him send the cameraman away and he says “Right, well, what’s the point of living if you’re not on camera?” (He was being sarcastic. Just FYI)
It was starting to feel that way, in the beginning. No, not like I had a motley group of spoiled, bitchy back-up dancers clawing each other’s eyes out for my attention. It felt like I had to put everything out there, and by doing so I was being rilly honest and artistic. Well, then a few friends found DogPoet. Then my dad found DogPoet. And suddenly I had to think about consequences and other people’s feelings and really inconvenient things like that. Let me tell you right now, if you are new to blogging and have any intention of sticking around for any length of time this will happen to you. People will find you. It’s all part of the process, it’s our communal growing pain. Trust.
So yes, it was very liberating to think “I’m not DogPoet.” I have a great real life, away from the Internet and everything. And there are some things I am dying to tell you, to tell everyone, but I know enough to hold it close. At least for awhile. That’s pretty cool. Kind of grown-up and everything.