If I fired up my blog software and wrote with no editing, do you know what would come out?

Comedy and Horror.

Rabbits. Funny little bunnies running every which way. Hundreds of them. Little cuties that would wear you out. You would run in circles for awhile, trying to catch them, and then you'd fall down laughing and exhausted.

Idea creatures would rise up at your feet, snarling and swiping the air before falling back, half formed, their terrible growth arrested by my lack of attention. They would lurch through the bunny races, frightening everyone and slowly losing whatever…I…was going to…

And I would be angry. Very angry. My mouth would be a furnace door, and I would open it and blast the heat of my anger across the face of creation. Which is strange because as far as I can tell, I have no good reason to be angry. But I do get very angry sometimes.

And if I wrote without editing
It.
Would.
Beeeeee.
Sooooooooo.
Looooooooooong.

So long. Oh, God make it stop. You would chew your own leg off if I would just stop, but I go on and on and on and on, way past the point where I made a point and should have stopped but didn’t of course. Oh, so long that it just hurts.

The truth is - the real truth now - I’m ashamed of my scattered and unorganized little mind, and my horribble spelling, and the way facts and names disappear at the worst moments. I don’t have very many pegs in my head, I guess. Certainly not enough pegs to hang everything that needs hanging. Somehow my mind doesn't have pegs, but it has a lot of thoughts, so these thoughts just float around in there. I can't find my file allocation table. My mind is like RAM memory. It's fast, but there is no easy way to find out exactly what's in there. I’m so obsessively tied to my thesaurus and my dictionary and Google. I have special links on my desktop so I can get to them as quickly as possible. Otherwise I would be lost and stupid.

So I craft and polish and fuss and powder my nose. I don't want you to see me without my makeup. And I don't want you dropping by unannounced either. I want time to cage the bunnies and slay the monsters and kick out the salesmen and check the facts and cut, cut, cut, cut, so it won’t be too long.

And where am I in this whole process? Where am I? The real me? I don't know. Sometimes I think the better the essay, the farther away from you I am. Every minute I spend polishing adds another layer of separation between us. My writing is a smooth surface, a shiny lacquered hood under which I hide my shame.

But relationship is constantly working its way through my armor, like a little plant that somehow cracks open the sidewalk. Through some miracle, the truth about me comes out. I am seen. I am known. Things I never intended to reveal make their way to the surface. Writing is very dangerous this way.

And then you comment and send emails and your names form themselves out of the swirling mass I call "the readers". We come to know each other, some of us. At least a little.

Somehow, as always, relationship finds a way.

rlp