Tuesday, April 05, 2005

The Freaky Psycho Blogger

Just at the moment, I am reading Just A Geek by Wil Wheaton (who writes one of my linked blogs, see below right.) While the book is about a lot more than his blog, it is still a fairly no-holds-barred review of what was going on in his head as he wrote some of his blog posts. It’s a very revealing and quite personal book that has got me thinking about what I am trying to get out of my own blog.

While nominally an ongoing letter to both my and Brett’s parents to try to make up for how rarely we see them, I am keeping it as much for my own recollection as for anyone else’s. It is my diary if you like. For basically egotistical (and, to be honest, laziness) reasons I have chosen to publish this diary online as I write it.

However, just as Wil found himself doing, I am finding myself often putting the ‘best face’ on events and not really talking about what is going on in my head as they happen. Skating over the ups and downs of life is probably providing rather bland fare for my immediate readers, and negating the long-term reasons for keeping a diary, as it doesn’t really say much about who I am as I write it.

Just by writing about my life on a frequent basis, I’m clear that it isn’t ‘interesting’ on the grand scale of things. Nevertheless I hope, in years to come, to be able to look back through my postings and have my memory jogged about all the little events that make up the fabric of a person’s life. So I guess I owe it to myself not to wash any of the colour out of the telling.

The upshot of all this electronic navel-gazing will be a more emotionally frank blog at times. It may not be to everyone’s taste (in fact I fear the family McHargue could soon be swooping down on Wimbledon to rescue their prodigal son from his freaky, psycho boyfriend!) but hey, that’s life! And, after all, you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to.

I suspect I've already inaugurated this new era with my previous post. Maybe more on that subject at a later date, but for now I'm going to go to bed. Too many late nights and early mornings are catching up with me.

1 comment:

John said...

I wish you luck in this endeavour, Liam. It is incredibly hard to write the truth when you know that it can be read by absolutely everybody. When I used to keep a proper diary, I used to have a daily list of people I liked and people I hated. Admittedly this was when I was 16, but it made me feel better at the time, and it's fun to re-read now I'm over twice that old!