It has since grown to encompass some of the thoughts and feelings welling inside me that aren't born of rage, but are also well hidden by the mask I show to everyone. "I'm fine, let's talk about your problems" is a sentence I speak a lot of the time. So, I started including some of the other emotions that dwell within Justin Black.
And, always, there was the sense of this as performance. I always include the audience in my choice of phrasing. I think everyone does, although I must admit I read few diaries. I'm not much of a voyeur myself, but I am a natural exhibitionist. Otherwise, I wouldn't be here.
Anyway, I was thinking about my relationship with you readers out there and what it means about me, and I finally said, "Fuck it!" Not everything has to mean something. As Freud said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." It says I'm an (already admitted) exhibitionist, and nothing more. Fine.
And why was I analyzing my diary habits? Because I realized I hadn't been writing anything in it lately, and shortly before I started up again at the beginning of the new year there was a gap of three months when I wrote nothing at all. NOTHING. I probably lost half my readership right there, and the exhibitionist in me thinks that sucks. But I'd noticed something else, too, about those three months: I didn't feel that cathartic sense of release a really good diary entry left with me. I was blue, and despondent, and alone. And I figured out why.
This diary works, if I let it. If I type out my feelings to the world in this form, it does something to me. Who cares WHY . . . It WORKS, and that's all that matters.
So, no more whining that I have nothing to write about, no more whining that my life is too boring to put words to. Dammit, even if I have a hundred boring days in a row, they're still days filled with MY thoughts, and I need to share them somehow.
So, welcome to the new age of the War. There will be a new battle almost every day, voyeurs and voyeurettes.
Until the next battle, think of me fondly.