What Can I SAY?

Follow my link to Amanda’s latest blog. Read it if you like. You may also notice that a version of this has been posted as a comment.

I don’t want to write this and I can’t believe I’m getting caught up in it all again. I just really wanted to see her latest, and she blogged today (my time zone) and I read it and I was in one of those numb suspended head exploding moments that used to hit me when I first read through them. And it’s not that the blog is particularly weighty and brilliant. But it really hit me. I know that I have been thinking about it more that I was before (but not before before, not like last year). And she comes out with this. And it’s exactly what I have been going on about whether that was literally, consciously, or on the blog or not; it’s on-point.

And what can I SAY? Here she is professing about all this wonderful connectedness of the internet and the fans and all that, but at the same time, I can’t reach her. So she reads all the comments, so what? She never said anything to anyone. She never read their blogs. It gets back to: WHO THE HELL AM I WRITING THIS FOR?

Amanda? Who’ll never read it or care and it would be uncomfortable for her to do so anyway because I need her as a mentor, because I’m a fan, and I don’t want to be. I just want to be a normal person, so we can connect normally because no-one needs anyone and it can work. But alas…

Or you? The invisible audience? The people directed from some forum I was on, the people unlucky enough just stumble upon the page randomly. Who I only talk to about Amanda and my singing lessons… and it’s so boring. Going back and looking at it I try to revise, some of it seems so half explained, just launching into my obsessions (although singing was explained better than Amanda).

Or me? For myself. So why the hell is it on the internet? And if I truly wrote it for me I’d put in all the awful details and names and places. And I wouldn’t keep it just for me. So I obviously do want someone to read it. But who? Shiiiit.

This is even more confusing than trying to explain trying to connect with Amanda over all the blog comments I haven’t posted.

Were the letters interesting? Anyone? A little? To a Dolls fan only maybe? Does it translate in other aspects of life?

Pfff.

So maybe I’ll send something. Maybe I’ll mange to compile it. A back-story, plus that unsent jumbled letter that I put here, plus relevant blog bits, plus my comment on what she said on her blog.

Bullshit.

So… what can I SAY? Is it enough to do what she did and say that it was amazing and completed your week and profound and ‘yes yes yes!’ like at those parties she used to have in college?

Is that real?

Does too real to be articulated in words actually come across as fake?

Sometimes I think it must. That’s what I thought when she sent me her letter. I though what she said must be what she says to everyone, because it was so simple and yet translated such significance. I just couldn’t think that maybe we had had the same effect on each other. That maybe I had given her a dumbstruck with meaning moment. I don’t think I quite believe that now. But I consider it.

It’s like what she was saying about Madonna in this blog:

but what seriously gives? who is this for? what's the deal? shocking? personal? media whore? demons out? just cause?
c'mon, madge, gimme some truth.

I mean she also says that Madonna seems fake, and I don’t think that about Manda, but the whole ‘true real intent’ stuff is all the same. That’s what happens when you want to know a person and not just worship them.

Yeh.

I want her to read it. I do. I want it to be readable for her and for you. And it can’t serve both purposes. Because if it’s her reading it then she becomes what she perceives has ‘me’, and that would be weird. But then she’s also a ‘you’ because she’s reading the blog, but in my blog the ‘you’s are in on it and ‘she’ is written as if she’ll never visit. If that makes sense.

It hurts to think.

And all of what she was saying about being female is what I was saying in Crushing.

She always had comments on her blog. She had a fan base and fans from before the blog. She’s never had to deal with the fact that no-one cares, or at least she hasn’t talked about it.

one difference for sure: the thing that's interesting about these books that i'm about to compile (especially in the case of the virginia companion) is that i'm peddling wares to a pre-existing audience,
i don't plan to cross-over onto the NY times best-seller list or get any press attention or prove to the fetish/alternative/gay/fill-in-the-blank community that i'm down in the trenches with them. it's all me and blank canvas and not much to prove. i am preaching to the choir, writing for an audience that already has (we hope) some connection with me, my band, the songs. so why am i even doing it? here we go.

And since I base so much of my blogging architecture on hers, I have no idea how to deal with it either. I just sound whingy. I know and I hate it and I want to be more than that. Which is freakily exactly what Amanda was saying about the new book (and I’m not just adding in references here):

the only thing i can come up with is that i'd like to answer my own personal challenge of displaying some kind of truth that's profound but not shock-valuizing, meaningful without being pretentious, self-inspecting without being egotistical, and relatable without being stock and cornball. this is hard.

But for whatever reason, she had a reason for starting the blog. I don’t think I quite know yet.

Is it like songs, like that guy from (Dallas Crane? Kisschasy? Other miscellaneous band?) said, that sometimes you don’t know what the song actually means until you take it out on the road and play it to some people? So when I get comments it will all be realised?

I keep thinking that I am sorting out something on here. That it’s some sort of great big exercise in god knows what, and the more I put on here and the later I stay up to do it, maybe it will suddenly morph into something amazing that will solve all my problems about understanding life (well, not that that’s a problem per se, but as anyone would, I would appreciate some help). Maybe someone (Amanda?) will read it and say that it was excellent and that my musings have actually benefited them in some way and it will all be worth it to have touched that one like that…

Not likely.

I mean, I still whinge about Amanda even after I got an email back from her. What more could a person want?

Connection.

The place.

To know a person.

To have that person I refuse to talk about on here back. And if not them, to just have what we shared. That invisible line of understanding. That’s what it’s all about. That’s what my whole fucking life is about. God this is getting deep. I want to connect with people on that level. I could feel it cut through me the moment I said it. It’s true. That is my mission as a person and as a performer. Same as Amanda.

There it is.

It’s my whole life’s ISSUE hanging on by a thread to Amanda Fucking Palmer, so forgive me, I think, if I go on a bit.

☆Anika☆