Candor Man

***My two house guests are back, Wallace and Sophie! Here for a whole week. They are super, super good doggies.***

For a couple of years while I lived in Tahoe, I had a journal. I’d type in it virtually every day. No one saw it but me. Now, I have this blog. It of course started as a blog about Bernie, but for the most part it has morphed into a personal blog about my life. It isn’t quite a journal, for I do not and will not divulge every detail of anything. As well, for the most part, I leave others’ names out of it to protect the innocent or guilty, save for matter-of-fact references.

When I blog, it is because I have something I want to say and I am in the mood to write. Usually, the reason for this is that to type and write helps my overall thought process about a situation. It is one piece of the thought process, and one piece only. What I write is a picture of my thoughts at that very moment in time. 

There are at least two problems with this.

One, thoughts change. As we gain more insight and perspective of a situation, in part simply the result of time passing, our thoughts and opinions shift. Rarely do I go back and read previous posts, but occasionally I do. And what I see months later is often not what I think “now." Of course, people who read this don’t know this, or at least don’t consider that, which is perfectly reasonable. You see words on a page that I wrote, so they must be what I think. The reality is, they are what I thought, though they may be what I still think. Or maybe not. And of course, I might have been flat-out wrong at the time I wrote it.

I got a review at work a couple weeks ago, which went very well thank you very much, but one of the things I said I need to work on is harnessing my initial thoughts on things until I’ve given myself time to think them through. I don’t have outbursts or anything like that, rather, what I say in the heat of the moment is often not on par with my thoughts once I have had time to consider. The same thing is true with my blog: What I write one day may not be my opinion or interpretation the next day, week, or month. That’s how it works, and to a point I hope everything you read here is consumed with a grain of salt. While Bernie’s Blog is not exactly an expose of my life, it nonetheless takes balls to put this stuff out there. You never know where your thoughts will go from that point on, and you never know who is reading what you thought when you wrote it. So I try to be gentle and tactful yet fair to myself. I am an emotional adrenaline junkie, so I need to say what I need to say when I need to say it, just barf on the page a little bit. Of course, anything I say here can be used against me in the court of life, this I know. Fair or unfair, it is what it is.

The second problem with writing stream of thought here is that readers obviously don’t have the full context, of both the situation and my thoughts. There’s always more to the story, folks. For every deeper or darker thought or experience I share, there are a million pieces on the subject that are swirling around my brain that you’ll never know, unless you liquor me up and ask the right questions. In essence, you see what I write, but you don’t necessarily know why I wrote what I wrote. And I’m not going to share everything I think, ever. A guy’s gotta have some secrets, yo.

I live rather transparently, at least much more so than I used to, though it does ebb and flow. There are, of course, limits to this, limits that often depend on my mood. I always appreciate comments left by readers about what I wrote, but at the same time I also appreciate no comments in the sense that I can write what I want when I want, and I don’t have to worry about being grilled, coddled, or beat up. I mean, we all have bad days, cranky dispositions at times, uninformed opinions, misreads on situations, and the like. It is nice to be able to share them and not be judged.

So keep the salt shaker handy, my friends.