Sex and Taipei City

Opening Credits

I have always possessed a long-held secret dream of blogging. 

I know. Very 1997.

But, as alluring as it seems, it's also on this hill that I have the most fear. Didn't an English textbook somewhere once taught me the phrase "don't air my dirty laundry in public"?

At my most diplomatic, I'm politely undecided about blogging (this is where I maintain that I have no opinions. Never have had them, and never will). 

At my worst, I'm capricious, swinging wildly between a range of opinions such as laughable, trite, cringe, honest, brave, admirable, and pack-my-phone-to-Timbuktu-Jeeves. How do people do it with a straight face? After all, what separates Anthony Bourdain on his acclaimed website from my dad's friends' spam-posting about whatever heritage pride they've decided to adopt this month in the comments section? What do I have to write about that's so darn special?

Therein also lies that secret niggling that on a spectrum of writers, I fall somewhere near the bottom rung where even with my neck strained and the priciest pince-nez I can only gaze upon the supple bottoms of Neil Gaiman and Candace Bushnell stratospheres above me. But that's not all that's holding me back.

The comedian Sean Locke once joked that Twitter is the most narcissistic form of self-expression. "That's all you're doing. Thinking people are interested in your... Mumbling, isn't it?" The devil on my shoulder is coughing pointedly right about now. She rasps, "He's right. If you truly enjoy writing, if it's about the craft, why not do it in secret in the dark on a damp tower? On a diary that's locked, under a bed? Let's not pretend you're not an attention-seeking vampire who only wants an audience and this is the least desperate way to coerce people into reading..."

But I guess there's the secret thrill in online writing after all. I don't want my mediocre scrawl in the hands of mourning grandchildren. I want the possibility of having been read while I'm in the flesh realm. To have the reader nodding along to whatever point I'm making. Isn't that all anyone ever wants? Someone to look into the depths of your gorged soul, gory and throbbing, naked and disgusting, dripping all over the carpet in your upturned palms, someone to see all that and not shriek, flinch or hightail? Note, it doesn't even have to be someone, *anyone* will do, hence the anonymous circulation.

And let's be clear, I'm not contributing to any academic pursuit or noble news reporting. I just want to get things off my chest, cut me some slack, will you, readers? And isn't the best advice to write what you know? Write from the heart? 

Maybe then I'll find a gateway to a more worthwhile topic and move up my ladder. Write of my heart, for example. And how it's been ensnared, broken, trampled on, put together, warmed and left hung to dry in a Mexican restaurant. 

 I'll take the anticipation and fear of that knowledge that a visceral part of me is floating in cyberspace. Let the mortifying ordeal of being known to commence! 

And as for being narcissistic, aren't all forms of self-expression a form of narcissism? Once again, I'm circling back to feeling admiration to those that dare to explore and expose. 

Future me, if you're still on the fence, remember all the cave drawings that have flickered in the light of a thousand stories. People have always done a version of blogging. Now go do yours.