Sunday, November 1, 2009

Behind the Wall of Words

It's taken me years to construct the wall. Word by word, brick by brick, you think I am communicating with you when I am really shutting you out.

The ruse looks like this: I write on many subjects, from many points of view. I am then established as normal.

Then my opinions and observations don't seem so odd. Just another unread guy in the blogospere. I project cosmopolitanism through references in many cities when the truth is I am an unemployed loser striking out at the world through a computer in New Jersey.

I can't accept this person as me, especially since I used to be all those good things in the paragraph above. I am a scarecrow, a hollow man, a vessel for pain in motion. Come, invite me into your pain. I can sympathize.

How do I do it? How long can I pull this off? I drag my hunched form across the landscape,transporting not brain but wretched body from here to there, but as they say in AA, it's only a geographical move. My body haunts me, seizes me, cloaks me into what you might say is carrying the weight of the world.

It is heavier than you will ever know.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Self-absorbed much?

tourguide said...

Exactly, and it is smothering everything and everyone I know.

tourguide said...

I don't know who you are, but you I've been writing only about a personal problem. I'm not interfering with your chance to breathe. Take a deep breath, smell the flowers, fill your lungs with pure oxygen; I don't care, Mary Sunshine. This is a venue for self-expression, in which myself and others have certainly written more bitterly and dejectedly when we felt that way. Your pseudo-tough talking responses reek of censorship and a prep-school jock meathead mentality.

Unknown said...

Hey, you're the one who said you were smothering everyone. I'm just saying give them (whoever everyone is) a chance to breathe.

So ease up on the anger and the name-calling and try to get over yourself. Other than when you write about your "pain" or try to be fake-offensive, you've actually got something to say. So say it.

tourguide said...

I prefer to write about subjects other than myself; but I'm unfortunately writing them from a body that has been wracked by pain for 16 years. I cannot simply deny that, anymore than Rambler denies his heartbreak, so I'm giving people background on my perspective; this has not been some kind of self-indulgent lark I've been on. I've tried every day to rid myself of this curse, and hoped that writing about it might be cathartic. To you, dear new "reader," it appears strangely provocative.