Why is that important?

I finally got up the -- I don't know if you'd say "guts" -- more like hutzpah? -- to start posting my blog posts on my Facebook account. I guess overcoming the embarassment of it -- the self-promoting

aspect -- the idea that you can't both constantly make fun of FB and use it for your own evil ends. But anyway, I'll see if I can get away with it.

After three months of keeping up this blog, more or less, it feels like what someone, somewhere, after a few glasses of Prosecco (**acceptable pre-noon drink) could call a legitimate beginning of something. Well maybe not legitimate, but a beginning nonetheless. Not just one or two entries scattered out over half a decade. So, we'll see where things go from here. Or we won't. Have you tried the Hide feature on FB? It's fabulous. Stop seeing updates that irritate you. If you want to, stop seeing mine.

In other news, I just found out I'll receive credit as a contributor (one of two names after the "with" on the cover) of a factoid book I wrote a few sections of for HarperCollins. Why is that important? It's not really. It just gives me a little more observable data to point to when asked what exactly are these vague projects I'm working on (most are behind-the-scenes work for hire, which can sound a bit dubious). I can't argue that it's important to be recognized for pointing out that Henry David Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau or that the Spanish brought marijuana to America in 1545 or that it was illegal for a time to swim in Australia during the day. But it's reasonably interesting cocktail chatter I suppose.

"Why is that important?" ---This is a question the mother of one of my best friends would often ask in response to almost any story that emphasized public affirmation or rebuke. Why is it important to get attention like that? And we'd feel sheepish and schlumpy and bow our heads and admit that you're right, you're right, we shouldn't want that attention for carrying rocks down the high school hall or singing happy birthday with barbershop harmonies to our chemistry teacher or wearing cheerleader sweaters or sucking inordinate amounts of helium and shrieking Desolation Row on the Porter Square platform, waiting for the last commuter train heading home. (It was just odd luck that the father of that same friend was taking that exact 11:11 train.) I don't know what the answer is. We never felt that we did it for the attention. But if it wasn't for the attention at all, why was it often so public? Why did it have a testing feel to it? There's just something oddly satisfying and liberating about it. I guess like Rhonda said about her life which is not open to too many people. It's --this is what I am -- this is what I feel like doing. I'm not going to apologize [or hide from it, except in parentheticals].

And there's an element of having too much energy around it. Not energy to accomplish something worthwhile, necessarily, (although that aforementioned amazing friend of mine absolutely did) but just this frenetic, pulsing-to-get-out feeling, which drove me to write songs, to write stories, to play music, to keep pushing the issue, to keep walking deeper into the park with Sky on snowy nights, to keep talking when I should have given up or gone to bed or both, to keep wondering what would happen next, to keep doing whatever I possibly could do to keep the story from ending.