4/13/00
WHY DO I DO THIS, ANYWAY?
All my life, the thing that I've enjoyed the most is telling, and being told, a story. My mother tells me that as a very young'un I wore my babysitter's throats out because the only time I would be give them any peace was when they were reading to me. When I am reading any sort of journalistic article, my eyes scan to the case histories, where what I call the "what happened" may be found, where I get the blow-by-blow account of how Sallie Ann Grodyface broke out in hives when she tried Xyco's new brand of almond butter but thought it was because of the baby powder she was using and filed a lawsuit against the baby powder company. Facts, figures, and dry academic explanations of the "why" of things bore me; I prefer a literal illustration, a good yarn. Listening to the actual story, the who did what to whom, where and when, is how I learn, how I observe. And telling a story is how I express myself, and hopefully teach others something too.
The Devil You Know is me telling a story - my own. The story of a guy, late-30s, discovering what his life's about, and what he wants to make of it. Sage advice for putting up a web page is: find something you care about and write about it. I care about transformation, my own and others', society's and the world's. I care about revealing how my perceptions of myself and my world are changing, how I am learning to take joy in my living and uncover the beauty that has been so easy for me to overlook in my life up until these last few years. How I am making the shift from being a shy, self-conscious overgrown 12-year-old hiding from the world, to a person who lives in, notices, and revels in the world.
Prior to beginning The Devil You Know, I'd never kept a regular journal. I only started the practice of writing for myself regularly in December 1998, little more than a year ago, with the Morning Pages (as conceived by Julia Cameron in her life-transforming book, The Artist's Way). Three pages every morning, of whatever comes to mind: prose, self-analysis, whining, dreams, anything. Learning how to spew in these three daily pages is one of the most valuable gifts I've ever had, but anyone who's ever written Morning Pages will know that those pages, spew that they are, don't lend themselves to being shown to the rest of the world. The Devil You Know exists because I want a way to tell a wider audience the stories I see, hear and feel every day. And because I want to follow the advice of my friend Joyce, who said: write about what we say and do now, because our world will be different in a year, five years, twenty years, and we won't remember then what it was like now if we rely just on our memory.
I regularly read quite a few online journals, enjoying them immensely and admiring the authors for their courage and resolve in revealing their lives to a potentially vast and largely unknown audience. From these, I learn how other people live, think and view their worlds, things it's been difficult for me to learn in face-to-face relations because of my own shyness. My turn now. Everybody's got a voice; The Devil You Know is me learning to use mine. Thanks for listening.
