Internet Vacations & The Nature of the Real

So, I took a self imposed weekend long unannounced and unplanned internet vacation. It was a good thing. I needed to take a hard serious look at my life, the way the virtual and the real do or don't interact, and the fact that I've been spending way. too. much. time. online lately. There are other issues in there, like the ugly one of substances used and abused, and the fact that the two things I seem to have managed to hold onto from my semi Catholic upbringing are this terrible urge to confess and then concomitant guilt and shame over it all. In layman's terms, that means that there are times, and there've been too many of them lately, where I get drunk & decide to say more than I should - or really want to - online. And then the next day I'm overwhelmed with embarrassment and shame and I want to go back and delete everything but the archivist in me (I worked in art museums for 11 years. Some of it rubbed off.) says I'm not allowed to do that.

Some of this has to do with a conscious decision on my part, about a year ago, to move from a very anonymous online persona to a much more onymous one; to allow the virtual & the real, for lack of better terms, to intersect more. I wanted to take responsibility for my words; to take ownership and not hide behind a screen name. The fallout from that has been that now everyone knows who I am and my real life friends and my e-friends are all one and the same. Which in turn means that when I get tempted by a bottle of bourbon to spill the uglier parts of my guts there's real life fallout. I haven't quite figured out how to deal with any of that (yeah, eliminating bourbon would be a damn good first step, and one that's been done) yet and so sometimes I end up with these crushing guilt hangovers. Like this weekend, although spending 2 days and nights not drinking and not going near the computer was really good for me. Among other things, I mopped all the floors.

So, if there are a few less posts forthcoming, that's why. I need to get outside more, to get inside my own head more, to read less and create more, to make more real art and less digital. I need to step away from the keyboard now and then. And I'm going to, particularly on the weekends. Of course, this means that some days, like for example today, there are going to be LOTS of posts while I just go ahead and write down EVERYTHING that occurred to me all weekend. But no system is infallible.