You know? I just can’t stay away.

I dismantled my online journal in August. The two main reasons: 1. I needed to be a little less visible to some people, specifically a trouble-making co-worker. 2. I wanted to focus on writing better. Having an online journal was making me careless and sloppy as a writer. So, I took it all down and for the past three months have been going through all the old articles I wrote since December 2000. I pulled out a few good ones and started rewriting them. Taken out of context, online journal entries can sound a bit weird. I began rewriting to make them stand alone essays based on the experiences of my life. All well and good.

However, I have found that I haven’t been writing anything NEW. Am I a writer? Or just a re-writer? Have I merely become an editor? I need to write! Too many things go on in my life. I need to tell somebody about it. My private journals are fine to sort through all the garbage in my head. And I suppose that one day someone will read those when I’m dead and gone. (Although, someone was reading them and I didn’t know it, which seriously contributed to the death of our relationship. More on that sometime.) But I need a venue for putting my writing out there for people to read and give me some feedback.

It’s more than just about writing I’ve realized. I am also missing the interaction of the online community. The feedback from readers and other journalists is a benefit that I threw out with the bathwater so to speak. There is value to that interaction, not just as a writer, but as a person. There are friends that the internet has brought into my life with whom I do not have direct, face-to-face interaction but who have been a tremendous support to me many times over the past several years. We still have email interactions. But I think I need to have the give and take of a journal again to broaden those relationships to the breadth they once had.

So, here it is. Crash Test Monkey. It’s real… and it’s gonna hurt! It’s me… incognito… dressed up like a monkey. No dot com name of my own. I’m hiding out with all the other monkeys on Diary Land. I’m already on my second rum and coke. You know how I like my rum! And drinking while writing sometimes enables a guy to express himself in free and unbounded ways. For example, without a few drinks behind me, I would never tell you that when I was eight years old I got in trouble for picking my nose and wiping the boogers on the wall by my bed. Without the influence of alcohol, I would NEVER admit that I was once eight years old! See? This online journal gig is good for us all! Uplifting and inspiring! I’ve selected several readers from my former email list to let you know about this journal, people I feel I can trust. We’ll start here and see what happens. Names and actual places may be altered along the way. But you will know who the man is behind the curtain.

Now... back to the rum!