I remember back in 1997…it wasn’t too long ago…I would sit in bed with my pajamas and squirt Welch’s Squeezable Grape Jelly into my mouth and watch the Weather Channel. It was a different time then…after I didn’t get that big promotion to Assistant Teller, my wife filed for divorce. I remember thinking to myself, “I want as many people as possible to know about this.”
At that moment, there was no Twitter or Facebook or what-have-you…I didn’t have a computer because my ex-wife took it with her. I kept a journal, but found the privacy too safe, too…practical. To this day, I think back to that moment, when my face was caked in a sticky-salty mixture of jelly and tears, that maybe, just maybe, if I had anyone I could talk to, anyone who would listen and not talk back…that perhaps it would, I don’t know, give me some sense of purpose. I don’t know. Either way, part of me wishes that she and I divorced in 2008 so that I could tweet through those television-filled Saturday (and Sunday and Monday and Tuesday) mornings. Also because I wouldn’t have had to suffer a decade of loneliness, but, you know, either way.
I don’t know what it is, but typing “watching TV in bed again, so awesome” into what I sometimes call “The Great Ether”…it makes me feel so special, you know? Makes the pain go away, just for a moment.
I find there’s something poetic in the hopelessly mundane. I think of almost every poem written in America after 1950, and how they are all simply about watching things through windows. So why not myself? Timeless intellectuals like Billy Collins get to have a legacy left behind. I want the same thing. Who knows, maybe someone will come across my blog and think, “Wow, he sure has a sharp wit and command of tone, especially in those passages about the Food Network.” They never message me, though. It might be a private kind of admiration. I can respect that.
But you’re probably asking yourself (assuming you’re even reading this, but I’ve adjusted to this pretty generous assumption) if I have any followers or readers, and there are some friends and family in the picture. Maybe some strangers come by and look through my musings…if they look through hashtag trends at precisely the right moment…which could happen, I feel, maybe.
If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that it’s time to lead a public life. And I’m doing so by keeping myself locked in my house and writing about the things I see on my computer or maybe on my desk. Or at the bank, you know, sometimes a check bounces or gives me one of those dollar bills that says “Where’s George” on it…that’s always a fun time.
I wonder sometimes if maybe she’s Googled me or looked at my Facebook page, or my Reader shares…or Buzz shares…or the Twitpics I have of me making funny faces to my computer. I have one that’s like four different copies of me, but it’s in the style of Andy Warhol…pretty neat. She always liked Andy Warhol. Or maybe just soup cans? She had a post about it on something, I think…to be honest, I wasn’t reading as closely as I should have been. I’ll admit it; I skim. I skim through her statuses from time to time. It is hard to pay attention to all that information, you know, to hang onto every little detail. Who can remember that?
