Bye Bye Bob

(April 28, 2006)

It's only 8:23am. I have been at work for an hour already. A whole host of reasons why, but while the coffee is brewing, there's a few things to jot down here.

Mostly, I am sad that Uncle Bob has hit a wall of inertia when it comes to his online diary. I know that wall, but it's writers like Bob that (without knowing it) give me a hand up so I can make it over and keep going.

Now HE can't get over the wall. This wall happens when you know that, unlike before, people who know you are reading the thing and keep coming back to you bitching about what you've written. "Is this going in your diary?" and such.

If you look at my archives, you will notice huge two and three month gaps in mine. I never filled you in on why there are gaps and what was I doing during those gaps. It's like...you just can't...seem to...where before your "voice" was your own, it's like you open your mouth and some other carefuller, un-you voice comes out...it's hard to explain.

Bob though, he's the real deal, he should have a column in the newspaper. The thing that rings most resoundingly with his writing is that he turns his observation outward toward the world, then spins them around to show us what he thinks of said world. The writer of the "good" online diary is a filter through which everything is poured -- movies, politics, books, sex, marriage -- and depending on the gender, age and personality of the filter, you get a certain kind of brilliance.

Diaries like Uncle Bob's are like picking up old books of "letters," collections of actual correspondence packed with references told in the parlance of a certain time. Read them now, say, a century later, and you feel like you have peeled back the layers of time to glimpse real life. We don't do "letters" these days. No one's collecting emails. We do online diaries instead.

It's better than (Seinfeld reference coming) nude badminton with swimsuit models.

The same reasons I'm drawn to Bob's apply to others, like Gilgongo, whose rants pretty much let me know what movies I'd like because she sees 'em all and talks about them.

But no one can beat Uncle Bob. All I can hope is that maybe he's planning to write under a different name, maybe even as a different gender in a different city, but tell the same kind of stories, and that someday I'll find that new diary online just by chance. Because I DO randomly click through diaries on a regular basis, looking for new ones to read. And you know what I've found? The vast majority do NOT turn their observations outward. It's all blithering inane sad sack pap of the "poor me" variety that tells nothing about a life, nothing about a point in time, nothing to hold one's interest. Entry after entry is me, me, me, blah blah blah, he doesn't love me, I love him, I hurt, yadda yadda yadda. For the love of fuck, already, get OVER "it," whatever "it" is and say something worth reading. Then it occurs to me that that particular brand of diarist is probably using this as an actual diary and doesn't care if it's insipid.

Man, I'ma miss Uncle Bob.