I need to get more comfortable before I write an “about me” page. That’s a little neurotic but sometimes it’s the simple things that are hardest to do. I feel two equal but contrary impulses. One is, for the “about me” page, to get autobiographical and long-winded. The other is to say something somewhat aphoristic but basically true, such as “My main interest is in God.”

The most fun I ever had writing on the internet was on tumblr back around 2008. It let me do any of those things, depending on my mood, write something short or long or poetic or historical or whatever words could do. I don’t remember the platform nudging me toward a pre-conceived purpose, which tacitly encouraged a style of hypothesis and experimentation, which (about me:) I guess is what my writing style is.

Also back then, there wasn’t the backdrop of incentivized mob behavior, the viral compulsions and hair-trigger pile-ons, that make social media such a manipulative and ugly “place”. Which reminds me, I think there needs to be a different word for the internet than “places”, because that metaphor is really misleading.

Writing an “about me” page is problematic because the basic things “about me” are complicated. There are things about me that don’t require explanation, but the basic things definitely do. It’s hard to leave them in writing on an “about me” page when I know it isn’t enough. So maybe that’s one thing “about me”, that you can’t touch the surface without going deep. Or at least, I will try not to let you.

(About me: I am cancer sun, pisces moon, and scorpio ascendant. This is a journey of water.)

Another thing about me is that I’m skeptical of online “community”. I’d like to be proven wrong. But my feeling is, something about being physically together—in-person visits and conversations, touching, the nearness of family, sharing tea or coffee or booze or snacks or food or smoke or a guitar—is a foundation of community. I have that. Writing is not that. Writing is something different than that, let alone posting a blog (or microblog, or photoblog, or newsletter, or whatever it is they do on facebook).

So I’m not looking for community, maybe more like correspondence, but also neither of those. I hereby take pressure off of anybody who reads this to ever reply or communicate in any way. Maybe blogging (for me) is like when little coral polyps release their eggs into the ocean, how they could have some wobbly idea what outcome they hope for, but also have no idea at all. Potential is promising but also surprising. Like tiny spherical offerings to the moon. To the moon, they are perfect as-is.

Something wonderful about writing (including on the internet) is how you can devote yourself to the silence of it.

Anyway, one other thing about me is, and I’m as certain about this as I am about anything, that God can be found inside my own navel, ha-ha. There are however many easier places to look.