As long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on–in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here.

(Morrie Schwartz) tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom

There is this line in the movie Poltergeist, the 1982 version, that the psychic, after they get Carol Anne back from the other side of the ghostly closet world, says out toward the camera, and hence to us the audience. “This house is clean.”

That sentence keeps circling in my head, this house is clean, this house is clean, this blog is clean. That’s pretty much how I’m feeling about this blog right now. I’ve been on about a year hiatus, which truthfully is not that unusual. If you’ve followed this blog at all you know that there are blog traffic destructive gaps in the writing. If you stopped following, I don’t blame you. I also don’t care. Not to sound like a jerk, but the only reason I am back here is because it finally occurred to me that I need to stop caring about you. Of course not in the real sense of not caring about people, but in the sense of trying to please you. The great big YOU out there in the audience. I will never be cool, hip, exciting, interesting, intelligent, or whatever other thing I need to be to impress you. I’m not going to build my audience. I’m not going to create a fan base, or a following, I’m not going to make any money here or some kind of a living here. I’m too overwhelmed and sometimes depressed (because I have depression so, you know, that’s the result of depression- gotta roll with it) to research how to have a great blog. Sometimes I look things up, like SEO’s and keywords, and I just can’t do it. I can’t. And finally, I’ve accepted that I don’t want to. This is because I discovered something while I was cleansing my blog. You see, I scoured through every single post I had ever written over the past- eleven years. I reorganized the entire thing. New categories, new template, and new focus. I reread many posts, and I trashed some posts (many posts) because they were not needed, and they did not fit into what it is that I have finally discovered I have been doing over the years.

This is a memoir. I hadn’t realized it till now, but it’s my memoir. It’s my history of the past eleven years of my life (and on till my death). I’ve decided, well, hell, I’d like to finish this book. So I reorganized, and I deleted, and I created categories that are really chapters, and I enjoyed the cleansing. I got rid of all of the pleading, because I could read it in my writing. I could hear the pleading in my voice. Please like me. Please like what I’m writing. You. You out there like me. Please save me and tell me I matter. All of that. I felt it come off the internet pages of this blog, like a noxious gas. A little sickening and a little sad. Palpable, tangible and so subconscious.

All of that was important. I needed to plead, and I needed to read and reflect on it all these years later with a kinder more compassionate self -perspective. I’m just a human. I needed to see that I had wanted to be more then just a simple human, and I wanted you to tell me; tell me that I was special. But, you never did. And I’m glad you didn’t because how would I learn? So, it’s changing. The voice is changing, and you, audience will either grow or remain the same or get smaller, but it doesn’t matter because I’m just here to write some stories. I’m on a journey to find out how I got here. How did a kid raised on welfare, with seemingly no chance of a decent future end up traveling and living in foreign countries? I want to know. I need to find out how. I’m curious as to know what happens next. Is it true we can write our lives? Let’s find out.

If you are reading this please forgive the mess. If you have ever seen Poltergeist you’ll know that even though she said the house was clean- it really wasn’t. There were still ghosts. Many ghosts. So, so many ghosts. In fact the entire family had to flee the home. They even got rid of the t.v.

Perhaps one day when I’m long dead this little time capsule of my life will resurface, and someone will learn something about what it was to live this little corner of my life. Perhaps not. Either way it doesn’t matter because I feel relief at finally seeing what this is all about. It’s about writing my own story.