WATERMARK

Dick Jones has a nice, rambly post about blogging and relationships:

. . . there seems to exist a curiously phantom element to
these inter-blogger relationships.  We may feel a powerful sense of
connection to the spirit, the soul, the essence, but have never heard
our friend laugh, order a pizza or swear at a jaywalker; we have never
held a door open for them, bought them a beer or given them a lift to
the airport.

. . . where the
absence of the sharing of a physical dimension for the friendship may
be seen as invalidating its essential currency, rendering it somehow
artificial, it can also be seen as providing the conditions for a
peculiar purity & intensity of communication. This individual has
availed him/herself of the proffered intimacies – those ambitions,
fears, aspirations, personal priorities, creative goals – & has
reciprocated in kind, demonstrating both understanding & common
experience & thus sympathy at least & empathy at best.
Untrammelled by the attendant (& not necessarily irksome)
complications of practical encounter, the functioning of the
relationship is streamlined & its currency is enhanced.

I once observed to my friend Abigail that folks who know me only online seem to know me — and like me — better than some who know me In Real Life. She said, Of course! They know the undefended you.

It’s that undefended me that checks my stats, and notices how they’ve dropped; that checks blogpulse and sees the steady and dramatic fall of my ‘rank’. But it’s the same undefended me that delights to discover that someone in China is writing about my blog. It’s the stubborn me who considers that too many poems and too much Artist’s Way has discouraged some readers, but continues to post them, anyway.

For whom does the blogger blog?