narrative

something that was said in post 1 down here got me thinking last night and this morning.

"I think it would be infinitely more productive for you to not indulge this self-indulgent personal narrative any further by yearning after "the other", whatever that means."

the key words were "personal narrative". i tend to live my life like a personal narrative, and view it in terms of a story, with meanings and symbolism and all sorts of clever literary references and tricks.

you can hear it in the way that i tell and retell important stories from my life, infusing them each time with more meaning, more significance, more symbolic portent. you can hear it in the way i tell stories about me in the third person, the way i assign "roles" to figures (people!) in my life.

like jurgen prochnow in that silly john carpenter movie, i'm writing my universe as i go along. that became most markedly apparent, i think, when i started blogging and began doing things specifically so i could photograph them and write about them for the blog.

pretty soon, the urge to "do stuff" began coming naturally with no consideration of the blog.

but still, sometimes the best way to make choices is to think of how they'll look in the writeup.