There are times I really wish I had one of those crypto-blogs you hear tell about — blogs that are maintained in strict anonymity, often in parallel to “public” blogs, where folks can chat and spew and vent and reveal and screedify without fear of their family, friends, associates, employer, etc. catching wind of it.
It would be nice, sometimes, to be able to talk about work stuff without being so circumspect. It would be nice, sometimes, to be able to talk about family, or friends, or associates, in a candid, even rude fashion, letting loose with emotions that would be highly inappropriate, not to mention hurtful, on these pages.
So, for example (to pick an utterly neutral and nonsensical example), it would be nice to be able to say, “I’m really getting soul-tired of driving my Subaru” without members of my Subaru road club getting all defensive or hurt, and without my folks worrying that I might crash, and without the person I sold my last Subaru to getting ticked off that I sold her a lemon, and without another friend of mine who has a Subaru thinking that I’m insulting him, and without Margie thinking I’m trying to wangle the next new car we get, and without my employer running across it and thinking I’m driving unsafely and firing me for that, and without Subaru USA suing me.
And, see, I’m now worried that someone is going to read that and say, “Ah, for Subaru, he means X, and so I am offended / hurt / worried / sad / furious.” That sort of thing.
But, no. Not going to go the hidden blog route, for a couple of reasons:
- As much as I do this for myself, I also do it for others — to keep people up to date on me and mine, and to record stuff for the future (mine, Katherine’s, historians’, whomever). Something that was as rigidly separate from me as a crypto-blog would need to be would fail to serve in that capacity. This would cease to be about me and become more about some carefully crafted public persona, especially since …
- … That way emotional separation lies. In some ways, it would be too easy to channel way too much into such a site, stuff that I should be sharing with my family and friends. Expressing it on one place would mean I wouldn’t have to in real life, which means I wouldn’t, which means I wouldn’t be as honest as I really think I ought to be.
Still, sometimes it would be nice to flag a post as, “anyone can read this except person X, or group Y — and, in fact, they won’t see the comments about it, either, and if anyone broaches the subject to them in real life, they will immediately forget that they heard anything about it.” Yeah, what I need is one of those powerful comic book magic spells — the kind that eventually crumble and fall over time, with nasty repercussions.
Yeah, maybe not.