Nekkid, Clueless and Feelin' Good: January 2, 2001

Tuesday,
January 2, 2001

What do you mean, I have to go back to work now?

Well, this bites like a bitch.

It's my last week in Stockholm -- last chance to get all those niggling little details cleaned up at work, last moments with Lyndon for at least a month, last oppotunity to get everything ready for my departure. And I am having the very devil of a time trying to find the enthusiasm or energy to do even a tenth of it.

It doesn't help that everybody I know at work is still on vacation or out sick, so I'm rattling around our hallway on my lonesome, trying to find someone, anyone, to distract me from the bloated gastrointestinal distress that is the task of proofreading project documents. Oh, and I still have to do laundry tomorrow, clean up the apartment, sort through what's coming with my office belongings, figure out how to get Lyndon a visa and green card, get my paycheck transferred to the joint account so that Lyn can use it to pay off my last Amex bill -- the list goes on and on.

I shoudn't be complaining, should I? I've finally gotten what I want -- I'm going home. This time next week, I''ll be in the middle of a new employee orientation seminar and planning to get my Texas driver's license and my rental car. I should be doing backflips.

I dunno. Maybe it's PMS. Maybe I'm just bloody tired, even with last week. Maybe I won't actually be happy until we're in our new place, with Lyndon sleeping beside me and everything sailing on a relatively smooth course.

Yeah, right.

I'm about to go out on a limb here, so you might want to contact the firemen and have them get that trampoline ready.

At the bottom of this page is a banner link. It isn't an ad, or at least not an ad in the usual manner of speaking. If you click on it, you'll be taken to the Diarist website and a page called Clix, which is basically a tracking page for 250 on-line journals. Each journal has a little banner and blurb, and you can read a journal by clicking on it, giving said journal a "clix-out" point. Clicking on the banner gives me a "clix-in" point, and the points are used to compute your journal's ranking in the list.

All well and good. And while I've dropped somewhat in the polls since it was instituted, I'm still in the Hot One Hundred, so that's nice. What I find interesting, however, is that a big chunk of the journals up in the top numbers of the ranking are. . .well, not to put too fine a point on it, written by some seriously fucked up people.

Talented fucked-up people, mind you -- I'm not knocking anyone's writing or HTML skills here, nor am I questioning their right to keep a journal of their experiences, or indeed those very experiences. But these are the walking wounded nonetheless; abused folk, the mentally unbalanced, multiples, incest survivors, all taking a deep breath and baring their souls to the internet via their journals. Which is admirable -- it takes cojones to discuss things like sexual assault, mental instability and childhood abuse in a public forum like the web, and then put your email address at the bottom of it.

But what amazes me is how popular these journals are. One of the hottest screeds (until it went on self-imposed hiatus) was written by a woman with an absolutely dreadful childhood and an addiction to cutting herself. Another is written by a woman with DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder) as a result of child abuse. And their hit rates are simply huge.

Why?

Well, superb writing certainly accounts for some of it, of course. These journals tend to be raw, real and completely engrossing -- you get to see a multiple's life from behind her eyes and experience the collective crowd in her head, or shiver with the gay man as he wonders if he's going to be raped in prison after being arrested for credit card fraud. There's also the power of unity -- burbs, peer groups and other organizations make for a healthy amount of flow-through.

But I think there's another aspect of the popularity that can't be ignored -- reading them is sorta like the internet version of watching "The Jerry Springer Show." You're horrified at the stories, but you can't look away; the sheer amount of blood and bile flying around is mesmerizing. And somewhere in the back of your mind, you really want to see just how bad it can get.

I'm not sure what that says about the race. Hell, I'm not sure what that says about me. But if it gets them click points and makes them feel that someone's connecting to their pain, that's good enough.

Isn't it?

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