The danger of public life

Tonight I learned that one of my blog entries had perhaps offended someone in the Circle of People Whose Opinions I Actually Care About. While I played it cool with a "yeah, yeah, I'll take it down" inside I was shaking and dry-mouthed and ready to leave the county, sell the house, buy a trailer...live somewhere off the grid, away from blogs and technology and perhaps just scratching my self-amusing thoughts in the dirt with a twisted stick, knowing that I could erase them once I had spilled them from my brain.

I have been told that my writing is BIG. It's OUT THERE. It's REALLY LOUD. I never know quite what to make of this; my blog writing is what is inside of me in that moment, unedited and unpolished. It's a far cry from my dark fictional meanderings about dysfunction and dyspeptic characters with shadowed pasts and a penchant for self-destruction. I keep that writing to myself, and only let out what I think is amusing and relevant and a slightly skewed reflection of What Really Happened. I, like David Sedaris, am sometimes more empowered by my imagination than reality, and see no issue with that in this blog.

Now, however, I am cowed. Anxious. Ready to leave the world of blog writing to people who write about cooking or how to get the ring out from around the collar. Things that can't cause people angst or concern or outrage. Who can be outraged about mac and cheese or how to blot red wine out of a rug? I'm sure there is some small contingent, somewhere, but this are probably the same people who don't own computers because they're the Devil's Machine and wouldn't have to blot red wine because only sinners drink.

So now I have a choice to make: to blog or not to blog. That truly, deeply...IS the question.