Intro more to come.		THINGS THAT NEED TO BE WRITTEN I don't seem to have many of my own. My job requires me to write, dozens of pages a week, and when I am not writing I am reading someone else's words, trying to massage them and make them fit into a vessel called House Style. I've been at this for five years now, and I like to think that I am getting good at making words fit in that vessel, small corner of the universe of language though it may be. But I wonder sometimes how well I have been trained by this experience. I almost never come home from a day in front of the computer and sit down to put my own stuff on paper (or screen). Probably word burnout of a sort; but when I make myself think hard about why I don't write I come near hazy views of an inability in myself, one I would rather keep hazy. I don't know if I am able to sit down and express my internal landscape to the outside. I think I approximate the process sometimes in mail I write to people, but this doesn't lend itself to collection in a diary or on a webpage. Too many secrets and other privacies. I have told a few people before about the sinusoidal curve in my life that swings me from social activity and friend-making in one year to hermitlike introversion in the next. This coincides with my love life in many instances; someone to be close to gives me a powerful incentive to join the world and see it with someone I care for. When a relationship ends, I am likely to go home every day after work, drink a beer or two by myself, and read three or four books a week. Listen to new music. Play games on the computer. Talk to very few people. Hike and camp alone, from time to time. Stay up all night in the dark straining for a glimpse of meteors in the light-polluted Tokyo sky. Solitary pursuits both fruitful and otherwise. I think it strange that writing never enters the picture when I am in this eremitic mode. I remember times when I stood gaping at some wonderous sight--red evening sun burning through the sheets of snow blowing off the mountains in Nasu, music flowing through headphones and becoming waves of tense cold down my back, my eyes unblinking focused on the distant veil, straining to ignore the telephone wires in between, this being the school of Fuji-appreciation in crowded Japan. Or humming loudly far above Siberia, looking down at the ice and snow and tortured frozen rivers, visible in the moonlight, and lit up at intervals by bursts of flame from some hardship post refinery in Russia's frozen north or by the curtains of silent light shimmering at the far horizon, only the second time I have seen the Aurora Borealis. Times like this. I am struck by the desire to verbalize my thoughts--far too fast for my words, for my ability to scrawl or type--and I jot notes on a page of paper or type scattered phrases into a laptop. Pure grasping. Little hope of accurate capture. I am left with a fading sense of what wonder I was feeling then and a disappointment at the failure to even sketch its outlines in a satisfactory way. And so I end up with these few sheets of paper, these files migrating from disk to disk, never coherent or complete, and I never feel that I have written, or that I can. I hate myself at these times. Not desperately, not to the point that I feel like trying to pry open the Boeing window and shoot myself out into the eighty-below air at 11,000 meters, but I believe at these times that I am letting myself down. And others, if those words had been captured and shared with them. . . . Perhaps. Why share them? Even if I could grab a few and string them together into something meaningful, who would read and care? My family, of course, and my friends who know me well enough to see me as sometimes deep and usually reticent rather than oblivious or aloof. But if something like what I am writing now ends up on my website, as this probably will, what stranger clicking in from god knows where would give a shit? Would I get flamed? Is this fear of rejection, fear of criticism? Is this the unconscious prod that keeps me from writing even for myself? I keep no diary in a locked drawer. Lately I feel this might be because some corner of my self (the one that would write, anyway) is always considering the reaction of people who might one day read it. First, even if I write something only for myself I could well end up showing it to others. "See what I did?" Considering this possibility, I fear their reaction. I am a boastful coward. Nice combination. To date, I have only written things that really come from honest depth in notes to other individuals--email, letters sometimes. It's easy to target recipients then; to craft phrases that I know will be effective. I am afraid to post my words for all comers to view. This page will be good for me. Posting . . . --PRD 5/23/2001