I was thinking idly this evening about things I'll want to change once the separation is final, mostly rehashing ideas I've mulled dozens of times before, when a brand-new one suddenly hit me. Maybe I can take this blog public again.
Can I?
Should I?
I went private back when I thought that Wife might have discovered it, when I thought she might be following me through it. At the time I was involved with D, and I didn't want Wife to know the details … not so much that I feared hurting her as that I feared she might use the information against me. And God knows that since I have gone private I have been very open about what's going on. I also had fantasies that I might use this blog as a forum for airing this or that legal strategy before deciding to use it, and naturally I didn't want her forewarned. But presumably once our agreement becomes final and is issued as a Court order, it no longer matters. Does it? Once we've settled who gets what, does it matter what she knows or thinks about me?
There are things I've written that I would prefer the boys not see … things I would prefer that she not show them. But of course there are plenty of things I've written about her that I'm sure she wouldn't want them to see either, so it could be pretty counter-productive for her to draw their attention to any of it. (Not that Wife thinks things through very well before acting, usually.)
I suppose theoretically she might pick on some of what I have written about alcohol use and threaten to re-open the question of custody. But I don't think my alcohol use is as alarming as hers – the boys have certainly told me bad things about her drinking and these days I pretty much don't drink when they are with me. Also, I can always respond by referencing her incestuous fantasies about Son 2. And really, custody is hardly an issue any more anyway. In ten weeks, Son 1 turns eighteen and ceases to be an object of custody agreements at all. Son 2 hits that same milestone in less than two years. If we did go to Court over custody, the first thing the judge would do would be to laugh in our faces. The second thing he'd do would be to tell Son 1 take a hike – welcome to adulthood – and then to order Wife and me both to shut up while he asks Son 2 "Where do you want to live?" Then whatever Son 2 said, that would be the Court order. Total elapsed time, 10 minutes. Case dismissed.
And of course she might never find it. She might (in the first place) never have found it before, and I was just spooked over nothing. Or if she had found it, she might not have written down the address or remembered anything concrete that would help her find it again. And there are … ummm, how many blogs out there on the Internet? The chances of Wife or the boys stumbling across this blog by accident are probably considerably less than the odds of finding a needle in a haystack.
Who else would I not want to find it? My father, for one. He has always had such a prurient, salacious interest in asking after the lurid details of my sex life – really, it's disgusting – that I would hate for him to find a place that answered all his questions. He's not very Internet-savvy, but I suppose if I'm going to worry about anybody I know seeing it then he has to be on the list.
What about D or Debbie? For each, there would have been times when I would have been fine with her reading it all and then other times when I would have wanted to prevent her reading it at all costs. Now, I don't know how much I care. Certainly there are things I say about each of them that might be embarrassing – and certainly there are far more things I say about myself that would be pretty embarrassing. But I don't see either of them any more, so what does it matter? D still e-mails me once or twice a year; I don't know why. I usually send very brief notes back, enough to be nice pro forma but not enough to tell her anything about what's going on in my life. My current theory on why she e-mails me is that it's sort of like drunk dialing (though I don't know that she's drunk when she does it) and that she's horny. So maybe at a certain point her need for sexual release overrides her desire not to make a fool of herself, and she sends me a quick note just in case I might have decided recently that I want to go back to fucking her brains out regularly. Then I reply, she realizes the answer is No, and she falls silent for another six to twelve months.
Debbie has e-mailed me a couple of times, but only when pushed by something external: like a few months ago when my "home e-mail account" started sending out spam by itself, or more recently when my father wrote her and asked her to come visit. She is invariably sweet, and says she has been thinking about me a lot – God, I hope that's not true! I think about her occasionally but not "a lot" – but she is also clear in a polite way about keeping the distance in place between us. Of the two of them, D is far more likely to obsess over whatever I have written than Debbie is. (Of course I also wrote far more about D.)
Now, if I took the blog public again there is one very easy way that either D or Debbie could find it, if she were so inclined and ever thought to try: google a line of my poetry. I wrote poetry for each of them, and I've posted all of it here. I assume there wouldn't be a lot of matches, if they chose the line right.
But maybe it is pure self-centered egotism for me even to imagine that anybody would ever look for the blog, or care if they found it. More likely nobody would care, and (given the chaotic disarray of the Internet) nobody would even find it in the first place. So that brings me back to the original question, … Could I? Should I? Does it matter either way?
I'm pretty sure at this point none of my invitees are reading either; but in case you are … please comment briefly to let me know if you have an opinion on this. I've usually found that when I ask for opinions, what I get back is better than what I was able to think up on my own. So I look forward to hearing from you.
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