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12:41 pm - Tue 6/11/02
Revealing Myself

Revealing Myself

(I just received some spam with the heading "Raping Animal Lovers Go To The Extreme". Now, over and above the obvious disgustingness, doesn't that sentence strike you as redundant? I mean, if you're talking about "raping animal lovers", I think the "extreme" part is already pretty strongly implied. But anyway...)

It's gotten back to me that there's at least one Diaryland reader out there who seems appalled-but-fascinated by what I write in here (I guess in particular by the level of self-revelation). Apparently, I write about things in this basically public forum that he either wouldn't or couldn't. And hence the appalled-but-fascinated reaction.

Now by-and-large, I tend to think it doesn't do me or "my readers" much good if I get all caught up in what people make of my writing in Diaryland. There's always the danger of becoming too self-conscious, and either leaving out things that make me look bad, or simply trying too hard to be "entertaining," either being funny and glib about things that really matter to me, or else leaving out mundane things that might be telling, but that I think would "bore my audience".

But in this particular case, this one person's response to Diaryland is interesting, because it plays into something I've been thinking about for a long time now.

It seems like everywhere you look these days, women are lifting their shirts to get attention, and guys are dropping their pants to get a laugh.

I find myself thinking about a sketch on "Letterman" some time back; Letterman had been on vacation, and when he came back, they did a comic sketch around the idea of what the crew did while he was away, one of the things being that they all sat behind his desk naked (There was a montage of various crew members shot from the waist up, behind Letterman's desk. It was a funny bit, but one I would have been very uncomfortable participating in).

I was listening to the song "Addicted to Love" the other day, and it made me think of an idea that Jane had years back; To celebrate a local theater person's birthday, she wanted me and a couple of other guys to dress up and dance around to that song, like male strippers. I remember being distinctly unhappy and uncomfortable with the idea (It was supposed to be funny, you see).

I think about Winona Ryder, who is on trial for stealing over $4000 worth of stuff from a store. She's on the current cover of W magazine, wearing a "Free Winona" t-shirt, and more recently was on Saturday Night Live, where they apparently did a lot of goofing on the incident, and I find myself thinking "If I'd been caught stealing $4000 worth of stuff from a store, I'd have the decency to at least act like I was embarrassed about it".

I think back 25 or 30 years, to the old Gong Show. Along with actual, talented people, they would have "acts" come on who would do stupid things like crack eggs on their head or what-have-you. I never understood why anyone would do that.

Fast forward to more recent times--Jim Carrey mimes talking out his ass, Johnny Knoxville on the show Jackass gets in a porta-potty that is then flipped over so he gets covered in crap, Tom Green gets laughs by "interviewing" people with a microphone covered in dog poop, on Survivor and Fear Factor and countless other "reality" shows, people eat disgusting things and go through various humiliations for a shot at a cash prize and/or a little on-camera time, and garner big audiences for it.

Richard Lewis, the comedian--who I've always found more annoying than funny--recently wrote a book about his recovery from various addictions and bad behaviors.

A lot of the book deals with his self-loathing, and how that factored into his relationships with women; At one point, he goes into great detail about how, if he was having sex with a nice person, he'd have to think about some horrible "date from hell" he'd recently had in order to get a hard-on.

I could go on and on, but I think you catch my drift.

I feel, often times, that the society at large has passed me by somehow. No one seems ashamed or embarrassed about anything they do anymore, so my own feelings of shame and embarrassment are starting to strike me as kind of...quaint. Distinctly "old-fashioned".

So it's an interesting perspective for me to get, that people reading Diaryland might very well be thinking, "How can he say that? Isn't he embarrassed? I'd be ashamed if anyone knew that about me, and he's telling the world about it".

Who knows? Maybe I'm not all that different from the society I live in. Maybe all I'm doing is metaphorically "dropping my pants" to get a reaction.

Something to think about...

 

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