God. God damn, you guys. Look at me. I was never athletic, but hell if I don't I win the Negligent Blogger Olympics, because I have made Non-Blogging into an extreme sport. I'm a natural. I milk it-- I like to keep the crowd extra-on-the-edge-of-their-seats by ALMOST wiping out, ALMOST caving and writing a new post, but then, in a sheer act of willpower bolstered by a deeply-ingrained sense of duty to my country, I muster up the requisite lazy assholery to leave my blog untouched. ("UNBELIEVABLE!" shriek the commentators. "We thought that so-and-so-Professional-Lazy-Asshole-Person was a lock for the gold, but dark horse Alana Murphy sweeps in and DOMINATES by taking one look at the blinking cursor on her laptop, closing the Blogger window, pulling up an episode of "Louie" on Netflix, and PASSING OUT on her bed eleven minutes into the episode, not even bothering to change into pajamas. WOW! Now Murphy HAS been inconsistent over the past year-- sometimes she falters and doubts herself, like those few times when she really went off the tracks and stayed up all night, churning out paragraph upon paragraph of personal history and scathing cultural commentary out of a burning deluded need to Capture the Human Condition, to pin Life wriggling to a wall, to prove her writing mettle to a nebulous and fickle online readership. But now, in the summer of 2012 when it really counts, Murphy has stepped it up; she has become a ROCK-SOLID, WORLD-CLASS Lazy Asshole Negligent Blogger. Folks, this is a HISTORIC. PERFORMANCE.")
Now that the Lazy Olympics are over, however, and I have my medal, I am permitting myself a momentary lapse in dedication to my sport. Kind of like how Michael Phelps kept getting caught with his face in a bong post-Beijing, you know? Except I'll be caught writing in my blog. EQUALLY ILLEGAL. Don't tell anyone.
No, in all seriousness, there is much to write about... but I'm not the writer to write about it, not yet. You see, this summer has brought in an unexpected abundance of riches-- wonderful, longed-for things just suddenly washing in at my feet like treasure from a shipwreck (ARRRRR, MATEY!) And I've been undergoing some deep, positive personal changes as a result. Something to the effect of this: imagine that, for whatever reason, you felt that you had been marked from birth, that you were somehow designated as wrong or "Other," and everybody knew immediately, especially all of those fortunate unmarked souls who instinctively knew the rules of the game. They knew to avoid you, because your disfigurement was contagious. As you grew older, you learned to disguise your markedness, to blend in and even cultivate closeness with other marked folk. But invariably you would be pushed away when you came under close scrutiny-- that MARK-- and so you resigned yourself to a high-achieving but somewhat personally impoverished life. But then! What if the Universe had spontaneously decided to reevaluate you, had determined that LOL there had been a mistake and you were not condemned after all? "We're going to erase your mark, sandblast it off!" says the Universe. Or, "You never had a mark at all! It was everyone else who did, all along." Or, "Public opinion has changed and now your mark is IN, it's beautiful, everyone wants one now, grafted onto their souls, but lucky you, you just HAVE it, girl!"
And that, circuitously, is how I have been feeling these days. Free, un-cursed (blessed, even), given to spells of intense happiness. And therein lies the problem: such sentiments do not for good blogging make. Why is it, exactly, that you tune in obsessively to Writer's Schlock time and again? (Come on, just play along and pretend that you do). Why does your heart leap when I sporadically, unpredictably post a link to a new entry, holding out the carrot, jerking you around and leading you on in some kind of morally questionable psychological experiment? What is it about my stuff that keeps you hooked like a teenager from a broken home who cuts class and turns tricks in exchange for painkillers? Well, I'm guessing that your addiction is more a function of salty, tasteless, borderline-shouldn't-be-posting-this-online sentences like that last one than of the instances when I gab about some huge effing BOON in my life or when I wax rhapsodic about the peachy contours of a sunset or something.
There was some smart foreign dead guy-- Tolstoy, I think, though I forget now because I haven't read a book since the internet was invented (JUST KIDDING, I read The Hunger Games earlier this year and I might even tackle Fifty Shades of Gray soon if I'm feeling really intellectually ambitious)-- who said that all happy families look alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own special way. And he went on to write about some seriously messed up shit, and became famous for it. That guy was onto something, because happiness/ bliss/ joy/ rosiness etc. are lovely states to experience, but they are strangely uniform, garden-variety, always exactly the same for every person ever and so they are especially susceptible to trite, cliched depiction in writing and in art and in popular media. Not so with misanthropy, pain, pessimism, betrayal, grief, jealousy-- states that can be arrived at an infinite number of ways in life, that can be ceaselessly reformulated and permuted, and that can thus receive premium artistic treatment from tortured souls who must fashion something eternal, something universal, from their one-of-a-kind suffering.
In other words, I, like many others, am most impelled to write when I am vaguely miserable or insecure or restless or lonely, and it is at those times that I heap on the delectable vicious cynicism that you all can't get enough of (right? just humor me) with only an occasional detour into poetic excess or tremulous, naive idealism (which can only be earned after I have been sufficiently snotty for a few paragraphs, and even then only let out in short embarrassed gasps). With this setup you all can come Schadenfreudify with me, revel in my acidity, my ironic distance, an ironic distance that you also take comfort in because it is borderline-necessary for survival.
But here is the thing. These days I've lost my edge. It's terrible! Shameful! I first noticed it when I started relating to the lyrics in top-40 music instead of hipsterishly decrying them as brainless and formulaic. I started cooing at small children. Horrific. I floated through a summer that has performed some funny temporal gymnastics, twisting and stretching and slow-mo-ing to accommodate endless meandering conversations, the sudden rapid accumulation of familiarity and closeness. In short, I'VE GONE SOFT. I've lost the ironic distance. I've become an experiential mess of flesh and blood, no longer even capable of aspiring to that shiny-simulacrum state that our generation prizes-- cool, critical, representational-- but now all giddy and hopeful and prone to thinking that I've unlocked the secrets of life when I do mundane things like bite into a nectarine purchased from my neighborhood bodega (a REAL nectarine, tangible and messy and juice-heavy in the palm of my hand, not an Instagrammed one that you documented all technicolor and sliced into a spiral pattern over your Greek Yogurt for breakfast) and I don't want to write about my bliss because it's hard to write about those kinds of things, which must be handled expertly, and my attempt would be sub-sub-par-- somewhere between Stephenie Meyer and Nicholas Sparks, not that there's anything wrong with them but OH GOD EW-- and anyway do you really want to read about spurting stone fruit and reawakened infant joy and mysterious, possibly terminal afflictions that may or may not sound a little like the word "glove?" DO YOU? DO YOU REALLY?
