Indulging in the Random

One of the disadvantages of being (in temperament if not by trade) a writer is that you tend to live on the page. This in itself is not troubling; I'm a writer, I live on the page, what's to get? The troubling bit is that, with any addiction, there's this damning trail of evidence -- the gambling receipts, the liquor bottles, the indiscreet phone messages. In my case, there are essays, mini-manifestos (it is just me, or is "manifesto" getting an awful lot of traffic these days?), lines drawn passionately but indiscriminately in the sand, criss-crossing each other in a testimony to my own scatteredness.

I recently had a bout of what I think was bona fide writer's block, where I felt like writing but didn't know what to write, or write about. I didn't freak out about it, especially since I didn't have any kind of deadline (and have really needed to be reading anyway) but it was there. I managed to toss off my pseudo-review of The Road, which I've been kicking around for awhile, and finally my last post broke through the fog, inspired as usual by something that happened to me at church.

During my writer's block I read through old blog entries and decided that there are definitely some threads of consistency, and that if I have a voice as writer (in my non-academic work), it seems to be telling stories and making observations as someone passing as an evangelical. I'm not sure what that says about me, but one of my book ideas is The Agnostic's Guide to Christianity, based on those stories and observations. [I'd like a better word than "agnostic" -- "heretic" might work, but I'm undecided. No hurry.]

As most of you know, I recently created a new Facebook identity for this blog, because every once in awhile I'd think of a potential status update that I couldn't share with the rest of the world. And pretty much everyone accepted my friend request, which I find interesting because it means that while the "Irritable Reaching" persona is technically anonymous, being Irritable's "friend" is, for the rest of you, sort of public (in a Facebook kinda way). You could go to my Irritable profile and see everyone I'm friends with. Not that it makes any difference. I just find it interesting. The funny thing is, I don't think I'm all that mysterious.

But it raises questions for me: who is Irritable, and what is his relationship to my IRL self? What intrigues me is that it seems like the answer is actually the inverse of internet anonymity. Irritable is me at my most honest, my most vulnerable -- to some extent, the "real" me. I have, a couple of times, thought maybe my "real self" is more of a believer and Irritable was just a way of blowing off a/theistic steam, but this never turns out to be the case for very long. My attempts to be or become a true believer inevitably feel like betrayal.

I mentioned on Facebook that I might be an "ironist" in the Rortian sense, and though I need to really dig into Rorty to know for sure (and this won't happen for awhile), I do know that he thought ironists needed both "public" and "private" personas, as the general public probably wasn't going to be all that smitten with the ironist's radical indeterminacy -- and Rorty wasn't even running in religious circles. So, in what seems like utterly appropriate irony, in a world where people create various and varied online personae to escape who they are IRL, I created one to be myself.