logo by chick

I'm not the kind of person who shares a lot of my feelings with people. Blogging has helped a little because it's one of the few "safe" places where I feel I can talk about stuff without having it come back to haunt me. I wasn't always like this. As a little boy I think I used to be very open about my emotions and my feelings. But over time my crazy mother eventually taught me to keep my feelings inside by ridiculing me whenever I said something that sounded "stupid" to her or whenever I would do something funny that might embarrass her in public. In elementary school I was always the class clown--an open, fun-loving, little boy who delighted in doing things to make people laugh. But by high school I had turned into a serious, quiet, reserved, young man who rarely expressed himself outside of a small circle of very close friends. One of my best friends and roommate all through college often jokes with me about how I share so little with people that he didn't even know my wife was pregnant until he asked me one day when we were going to have kids and I said, "In about 8 weeks," because that's when my daughter was due to be born. In my own young son I see some of the childhood jokester that I used to be. And I see the way he shares his feelings and emotions so openly. And I wonder how long that will last. When I got married I thought I would try to start fresh on a clean slate, so I began opening myself up to my wife, forcing myself to tell her things that I normally would not have told anyone. But I soon found out that even she had a habit of using those things against me later on. So eventually I stopped sharing my secrets with her. People like me don't want to keep things inside. We want to tell people how we feel. What bugs us. What delights us. What scares us. But we're so used to having to protect ourselves by keeping those thoughts hidden that we rarely ever share even the things that we want people to know. And even our best friends have to pry it out of us. I look back on this blog and, quite frankly, I'm amazed at how much I've shared. Sometimes I've backed off when comments have gotten particularly harsh, but for the most part I keep bouncing back, and I think that's a good thing. Maybe it's because I figure that because this blog is anonymous I can always just shut it down if things get out of hand. But thankfully I've never really felt like I wanted to do that. There's still a ton of stuff that I haven't shared about myself on this blog, and probably never will. But if nothing else, you all know how much I like to eat pussy--which pretty much sets you apart from anyone else I know in this world. So thanks. For listening. And for not getting on my case too often.