Necessary Insanity And Blogging

I may lack the prerequisite dose of insanity necessary to be a writer. I don’t have the background or issues of a Penelope Trunk who writes, “When I was five, I knew something was not right. That's when I started therapy. I was never totally sure why my parents were sending me. When I was seven I knew something was not right because the neighbor came over to our house when my parents were smashing picture frames over each others' head. The neighbor said to me and my little brother, “Come with me.”

When my first wife and I were going through marriage counseling we had to fill out a questionnaire on family history. One of the questions was something like: What are your memories of your father? My answer was that I remembered him holding a knife to my mother in the kitchen. Surprisingly my answer was very different than the one my ex had put down for the same question.

Life isn’t safe. It is the edgy and the scary stuff that I want to write about. If I’m insane and not aware of it I will scare off my readers. If I write in the confines of normality in the same way that I live and work within those confines then I may lose an interesting edge.

I attempt to write “from the marrow bone” to make things interesting. Susannah Breslin believes that Crazy People Make Better Bloggers which I suspect is true. There’s a fine line there---let’s hold hands and cross it together.