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The Art of the Blog -- A Home for the Alienated Soul

From my childhood years to middle age, I have been a solitary and lonely man. Repeatedly I have identified throughout my life with the miserable and the forlorn, and I have clung with a death grip to whatever person, place, or belief that seems the current answer to my anguished and ceaseless search for orientation and structure. Malcolm Lassman -- an individual of substance and good standing in the community of lawyers -- used to say to my sister: "He acts as if this is the only place he can work! There are other employers out there. This is Washington, DC! Why does he act like this is the only place he can work?" I cling with a death grip, Mr. Lassman, to any individual or organization that provides orientation and structure for me. So now you know!

I was not an easy child. According to family lore I was indulged by "tender-hearted parents" but still proved "troublesome and self willed." Schoolmates who knew me before I was twelve, years later particularly remember my apartness: "He did not play like other children but read all sorts of books insatiably. . . . He liked to go by himself on many long walks across the fields. . . . He went off on his own for most of the time and wandered for hours alone around West Oak Lane and even quite a long way from that Philadelphia neighborhood." My sister recalls that as I grew older I was "perfectly unconscious of having distressed his parents in that he never joined the happy family group, never met people, but always sought solitude." Struggling constantly with melancholia, I as a child and man was an observer rather than a participant.

As an adult my dream of happiness has posed an insoluble paradox. At the same time as I see the world of everyday events and people as infinitely appealing, I see it as overwhelmingly threatening; every corner in the "dizzying tangle" of nature reflects my own internal chaos. The best I can do to keep my tumultuous and unstructured fears and longings at bay is to withdraw from social contacts, retreat rather than merger consistently characterizes my efforts to establish satisfying relations or settle on a career or a job of any kind. Only after committing myself to the art of psychosis -- psychosis, if done well, if done properly as psychosis should be done, is, after all, an art, perhaps the highest art -- did I seem able to overcome a pervasive sense of inadequacy and disillusionment; but even then only in the work of the blog do I experience feelings of adequacy and fulfillment.

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