The Loneliness of the Long Distance Blogger...

I'm sure someone else has used this title, but I think it bears repeating. It is a lonely pursuit, I think - or it is fuelled by a sense of loneliness; a need to connect. The best blogs seem to make a virtue of this - mentioning no names*. But there are a lot of us in relationships who, to varying degrees, divide our lives up between what we have here and what we (laughably, or otherwise) call our "real" lives. You don't have to be single to be lonely, (or vice versa) and it seems to me that there's a sort of iceberg thing going on with the blogging life. The visible peak (our day to days - work, family, friends etc.) is like the rouged cherry atop the submerged Mr. Kipling cake of our *private* stuff. To those who commit to them (and I think it *is* a committment rather like a signing up to a job or a marriage - something that's great fun at first but soon can become a tiresome, sapping routine) blogs are our hinterland, our back history. It's a bit like surveying one of those epic John Ford Western style panoramic landscapes from the safety of a four-wheel drive (marvellous to behold, but you wouldn't necessarily want to be stuck there in the dark, miles from anywhere with no route home). And it can feel a bit like that sometimes, when you come up for air after several hours communing with poeple you don't really know, only to find that the four-wheel drive you were relying on to get you home is low on gas. And has a puncture. And the air conditioning doesn't work. Because you were too busy taking in the view to worry about your passage home.

There's something both emancipating and enslaving about these weird new "virtual" relationships that our blogs open up for us. You could argue that the same is true of most "normal" relationships, but I do think that there is an element of nuance that banter in - for example - a pub will have that can go missing in the rather more sterile, cerebral, words-floating-in-the-ether realm of the comments box. How many of us, for instance, have come away from comments boxes feeling slighted or annoyed or just generally peeved, only to find out that there have just been crossed wires(or that you were posting pissed?)

Just an unprovoked ramble here, there's no agenda or deeper point, but I'd just be interested to hear how other people feel about the way that their blog life intersects with their "real" one.

I just sometimes feel as if I have two, that's all. Lives, that is.

*Spinny, obviously.



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