The sacrifice

Imaginary people ask me "Do you lie a lot in your blog?"

To which I answer "Only when absolutely necessary."

And they civilly reply "Liar!"

"Yes, yes," I say. "Fair enough. But I had to."

Or, to circle in on it, you read an amazing amount of blogs. You spend several hours a day keeping up with all the fantastic blogs and you wonder "Why are all these blogs so amazingly, freakishly, relentlessly good?"

Because we all just pick out the good parts. We extract stories, collect them like we're beach combers, we distill them from the deadly trickle of life. Yes, life is a leaky faucet, each drip coming inexorably after, but delayed, from the last, ever unavoidable, slowly driving us mad.

Dark, no?

But we collect the maddening drips in an array of cups and saucers. We sort them into tubes and vials and vases and glassware. We line them up on windowsills so sunlight and starlight shines through them. Leaves dance behind our arranged waters, the movement of cats, car lights and streetlamps, the falling sun. We tilt them and overlap them, dry them into evocative stains, spill them carefully. We pour in sand and broken glass. We study their effect of light, of obfuscation and illumination.

And if nothing works? If all that clarity of water is too transparent, too invisible, too diamond hard, then we can always add a touch of color.

How? How do we add color?

A drop or two of blood is traditional. I mostly use coffee, lies, and night.