There are times when I wish I could say
everything that's really in my head. All of it. There's so much
sometimes that it feels crowded in here, like the crush of the street
in Kolkata or Beijing at the peak traffic hour. So many voices, so
many observations and rants and raves. So many jokes and stories and
things to say about the world.
I could talk literally forever without
running out of words, ideas, concepts, interests, fascinations,
obsessions.
But I don't. Because that's not what
one does. One selects, carefully, the words and ideas and statements
one can make. And one comes to places like this and forms safe
pieces that can be posted without calling down thunder and wrath.
One does not reveal what truly lies in one's mind and heart.
Because...
I don't know. Maybe we just can't do
better than tolerate each other. Maybe what's in my head is just too
ugly and chaotic and off-kilter to be shared.
I write stories, and poems, and little
essays, and those are analogs for the worlds and constructs in my
head. By paring them down to a few characters and situations, I can
make them real, in some sense. Comprehensible in scope and
complexity. But they are all me, one way or another, some small
facet of the neural network of storms that I live inside.
I envy the freedom of a man like
William Burroughs, who simply let that out into the world, and found
respect for it. Or Hunter S. Thompson, who made a career out of
showing off the darkest parts of himself and daring people to judge
him for it.
Of course, they were both completely
fucking nuts.
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