The Word Made Flesh Is A Stripper

This blog has been around since 2003. I first posted when I was 18. It has a history! It is me but is not me. By this point, Head Wide Open is an autonomous being. A part of me, to be honest, is an egomaniac who thinks it should be much bigger than it is. Another part is impressed that the the void into which I shout - occasionally - echoes back, jarring my sense of isolation. A reader commented that my writing displays a lot of testosterone. I never thought of it that way, but it's true. I am mostly placid in real life. I keep things inside, hence Head Wide Open, which is not in fact my natural state.

Head Wide Open is an open diary of consciousness. I can think of no better description than that. I suffer from a surfeit of consciousness. It's not an attractive condition. So here is where the consciousness goes. It is not academic or journalistic - filtered. There are enough filters in the outside world. "Man is a miserable pile of secrets." Here are mine, piled up. The weird thing is that other people are conscious of my consciousness. Some of them may be more conscious of my consciousness than I am. For a solipsistic disembodied Cartesian I (that is, I), this is disturbing but also vaguely arousing. I am displaying my psychological dirty parts. To see my self, true self, through the gaze of the Other makes me an objective being. The Other is the aleph to my golem.

The elephant in the room is death. I am horrified by death. This is my mind trying to live forever. Everything not word is flux. I am trapped in a world of perpetual becoming, archly symbolized for me by my obsessive thought patterns. My every pacific state is disturbed by the imp of the perverse. But this, this is permanence. This is the invisible made visible. As such, it is an idol. It is not the real thing. But the real thing is inchoate and incommunicable. Head Wide Open is the facsimile of my self. My brain also contains links, which I am constantly clicking.

I am not always, or usually, so conscious. But when I am, I have to capture it. Here it is, captured. Tomorrow I work, nod, smile, and live in the real world, except for a small part which I have just put the zoom lens on.