Dean's World

The freedom is paralyzing and I don't like it much. Dean handed me the secret code to the control room and dared me to write one single paragraph about anything at all. I think it was weeks or maybe months ago. I keep stalling. He knows I am frozen solid from 20 years of magazine journalism, which has given me a rich and properly traumatic life, but also made me spectacularly uptight about whether what I write possibly has whiskers that need clipping. You never know what people might say, not to mention women.

Magazine journalism is not to be dismissed but it is safe to say that the form teaches us to bind our true selves as tightly as Chinese maiden feet. (The Censor is frowning: "I'm not entirely clear what you mean by Chinese maiden feet.")

It was the rythms that started to drive me crazy, in the end--the rythms of the journalistic prose that were identical to all the rythms that had come before. They seemed to correspond to core grooves that existed in our minds, that had not and would not be perturbed, that somehow say: "I am the voice of reason. I am the voice of reason." Terribly ungenerous.

So.

Dean Esmay has been--for about a year-- inviting me to understand what blogging is, and to try it, and I have reacted like somebody who is asked to run naked down Broadway. Tonight he pressed me a bit harder, and actually made a case for the idea that if I write what I am really thinking and feeling it will not be a disaster.

But where is the EDITOR? Where is the HOOK? Where is the STORY?

And what if it isn't "working?"

Dean says not to worry. I can be myself.

Why?

You mean I can say anything I want?

Ok then. I'll tell you some things. The war I won't name (you denialist scumbags at Dean's World know what I mean) is raging all around, all sides being driven to screaming hysteria, lawsuits, e-rage, fire and brimstone accusations. I breathe shallowly and watch from a ditch, and dream of home.

Home is Sweden, where I grew up. I got a letter today from one of my closest friends, who's known me, as he likes to remind me, since I wrote my views straight onto my ripped jeans with a black Sharpie pen.

I swore I'd get home by midsummer (June 23) but I didn't make it. He said the gang was awaiting me expectantly and had plans to sink my laptop and cell phone into the Baltic sea under the dock on day one.

Then we would do as we always did; Start a fire, get the guitars, pour some schnapps, go pick wildflowers for the table (my job.) I kept writing cramped emails explaining that I was trapped in some kind of psychic warfare that made it impossible for me to do anything other than defend and survive--hammer out unending emails to an unyeilding universe. Gain one yard, get beaten back, advance again. A political existence, barren either way.

Our summer island is called Runmaro, and it is the gem of Stockholm's archipelago. Everybody was there, I hear, including Erik, who is never without his butterfly net, and who babysat our favorite poet Tomas Transtromer's butterfly collection on the island one summer. (This story has a subplot I won't reveal just yet but if you stay with me in my new incarnation as late night blogger, all will be revealed...)

So there I was, stiff with worry, sick with worry, over the war, the pogrom, the gangrenous infinity of it all.

And my friend wrote: "Erik told me that the Apollo butterfly has just been seen on Runmaro again!"

That is the famous butterfly that Mr. Transtromer wrote an ode to: "How I love that butterfly. As if it was a fluttering corner of Truth itself."

That's the story: The Apollo Butterfly Has Just Been Seen On Runmaro Again.

I was going to start posting hundreds of pages of data about who is Right and who is Wrong, but my soul went with that butterfly, and I decided he or she is a much better story.