Step back and take a DEEP BREATH

So…starting to get a little squeamish?

A co-worker told me that I was a little angry on this blog yesterday. A little? Hmm…darn it, I was going for a lot of angry; guess I’ll just have to work on that.

Another has said to me a couple of times that if I don’t want her to read this blog to just let her know. (K: it’s really okay. That’s what it’s for.)

I believe very strongly in the shared experience of life. That we’re all in this together. Not that we are all actually are connected in some mysterious DNA kind of way. But I think we, us, all of us, white, black, green, red, yellow, purple, old, young, gay, straight, bi, curly, believers, non-believers, male, female, and anything in-between, can lend a hand to one another just by cluing each other in on our personal experience of this reality we call life. That we have a heckuva lot more in common that we thought.

I mean, isn’t this what this Internet thang is supposed to be all about? Connecting? Reconnecting a world gone awry?

The digital world has connected us in so many ways, but the one thing it did was strip away all emotion. We’ll say things in email or respond to a blog in language that we would never say to a person face-to-face. All I’m trying to do is put the person back in the digital world.

I lived in a neighborhood where the woman across the street from me died, and I didn’t even know it. Didn’t know her, had no idea that she died until her son took over the house. Two doors down a man, a husband and father of two girls, slowly died of cancer and I knew about it, but didn’t know about it either. (Why were all these people dying in that neighborhood? Thank God I got out alive!) These momentous life events—death is a life event, we just don’t talk about it—and everyone looked the other way.

We work so closely together, but retain that “professional” distance. But what’s wrong with knowing that the person who you’re riding the elevator with has money problems? Gets depressed at times? Gets angry? Regarding yesterday’s blog, I wouldn’t be human if I wasn’t angry about some of the things that have happened to me and that some people have done to me; there would be something wrong with me if I wasn’t. These really are just regular, everyday, human experiences. As are even the bigger, darker ones that we keep so secret. Shhh...divorce. Adultery. Alcoholism. Drug addiction. Serious mental illness. Nah, just normal human experiences, I'm sorry to say. It's like sex: We really make too big a deal out of things.

I was talking to Ryan Landry this morning, a founder of the Gold Dust Orphans. Ryan is a self-proclaimed 46-year-old queen, and said he doesn’t consider himself male or female. He considers himself human. Now there’s an interesting concept. He and I just this morning were talking about how he tries to show through drag, vaudeville, and burlesque the similarities we all have as human beings.

It’s a risk. I know it is. Not everyone’s going to buy into this. It’s weird, someone might say. Someone else might say, it’s interesting, but I couldn’t lay myself out there like that. I’m too shy. I’m too private. And there’s the inevitable, he’s psycho, run away.

Well, whatever. I repeat: Wasn’t the Internet supposed to bring us all together? One big digital world? Well, what about it? I mean, do you really want to use it for just selling cars and our used crap on e-bay?