I’m not apologizing for the emotional exhibitionism of yesterday, mind you. But if it caught you off guard, imagine what it was like to be me. Originally I’d thought yesterday would be a good day to assay Min’s postcard template because I was feeling kind of blah, and after I gave you the lowdown on the Alibi and the obligatory update on my sudden fast-blooming fondness for the Scam, I did not relish the idea of sitting around and having to dredge up through my hangover all kinds of deep thoughts about terrorism or solitude or credit-card debt. I didn’t feel equal to the least of such topics. So I thought, Oh cool, I’ll just do that postcard thing, and that way all I’ll have to do is think in short-paragraph sound bites, fill up two pages and be done with it. (I’ve been falling short of the mark with respect to my pledge to write less here, or do I mean overshooting it?, but the Widget is just so stultifying lately, you have no idea. The Monitor functions as my lifeline to quitting time. Besides, I have the sense that I’m finally starting to make – vague, subjective – progress with my writing, and when that happens you just happily usher it in and say, Hey, whatever works. I do feel like such an arrogant buffoon by the way saying “my writing” like that, like “my beliefs” or “my issues,” as if I’m on an episode of Thirtysomething – but, like an acrylic nail, I press on.) You saw what happened instead. Some of those things I barely knew I *thought* before I started writing them, then a trapdoor opened and I could see all the way down to the bottom. Did that pressure drop come across to you, reading yesterday’s entry? I’d be interested to know. After I wrote it I felt squeezed dry, and I had to go walk around a bit while listening to the Murder City Devils, and I could not make the sound go loud enough. I was short of breath, and at the Larry’s Market salad bar when I reached for the spinach tongs, my whole arm was shaking.

The display-vs.-warehouse thing was on my mind in the first place because I’m going to start doing something that instinctively I do not want to write about in the Monitor. It has to do with what’s often called “involvement” in something, and when the opportunity to so involve myself presented itself earlier this week, my very first thought was Hell yes, and then directly in its wake was This one stays out of the diary. I'm not much of a guts-spiller – I would have never been able to sign my name to yesterday’s entry; the anonymity Diaryland affords me is a psychic Maginot Line – and the nutshell reason for that has to do with my orientation to the individual. I don’t accept that what’s shared becomes more valuable or more valid, nor that time spent in the company of others is de facto more fulfilling than time I spend alone. I don’t believe that a passel of people is necessarily a learning experience waiting to happen. I have not been able to resolve problems in direct proportion to the number of comrades I ask to listen to me think through them, and I get no enjoyment from the spectator sport of watching others go through their own problem-solving processes – if I’ve got something to contribute, that’s another matter, but I resent being asked to play audience to a psychodrama with scripted intervals of chest-beating and a scripted resolution. Some boyfriends have found not very cozy the fact that as long as my feelings are on an even keel, I don’t get off on the fetishistic invocation and roll-taking of them, reciting in pornographic detail that which has not changed one bit since the last time they asked me: I mean, with a boyfriend on the scene there are literally dozens of things I’d rather do than sit there and *talk* about how great it is to have a boyfriend on the scene. And I maintain that all of this doesn’t make me a misanthrope, and as regular readers will note, it hasn’t kept me from having friends (probably fewer than you have, but that’s OK, I adore the ones I’ve got and don’t begrudge you your larger posse) nor does it keep me alone in my apartment petting the cat and boo-hooing that everyone hates me. How I live is consistent with what I value -- and one of my fundamental beliefs is that only I get to say what in my life has meaning, what in my life matters. Often the things that I most treasure are the ones I guard most privately. (Though obviously I’m much more open in the Monitor than I am in real life except among close friends, when a reader asked with reference to the verbosity of my diary entries if there was anything that I wouldn’t write about here, I could have bust a gut laughing. Criminy, I’m holding back novels. Encyclopedias!) I started to make that sentence longer, adding a comma and a “because,” but then I stopped. Because has nothing to do with these things. They’re like love, they just *are*, and explication is beside the point.

A while ago, I was talking politics with this guy I know, a fine fellow but the type of Thirtysomething squishysomething who would, in fact, use such a term as “my causes,” and he said to me, Why don’t *you* ever write letters to politicians and give money to the organizations you support? How do you know I don’t, I snapped. Well, because you never talk about that kind of thing, he said. And that is exactly what I mean. I’m uncomfortable with the bumper-sticker mentality where if I’m not advertising something, then I must not have it in stock. I’m a rather private person and others are not – fine with me, everyone needs to define and live by their principles and it would be anathema to me to be seen as trying to impose mine on anyone else – but when did letting it all hang out take over the moral high ground? When did it become acceptable to carp at someone for failing to brag about how much she gives to charity? When did it become a social faux pas to keep one’s heart behind the ribcage rather than on one’s sleeve? I do try very hard to be tolerant of others and to assume that they too have a coherent value system undergirding their lives – even if I can’t see it, so there – but when people try to tell me that I need to start being less selfish and more aware of the world I live in just because I don’t wear the AIDS ribbon, just because I sometimes read Reason magazine, just because I tend not to buy organic produce, well then, I will confess, there rises up in me an intolerant urge to smack them in their scrubbed smug faces and say, How dare you presume to know who I am. And if I put on the ribbon just to shut them up, they congratulate themselves on my conversion to higher consciousness and then go away. Which to me is so full of irony that it could practically cure anemia. Yeah, that’s it, wearing a ribbon means I care, I care so much, look, look, everybody, and see what a caring person I am. Don’t *anybody* fucking tell me that my lack of self-decoration means I don’t care.

(I found a diary the other day that's on 89 diaryrings, one of which is Don't Label Me. Um...)

The ribbon of the moment is the American flag that waves over this great God-loving nation as we prepare to enforce our enlightened moral superiority on the heathen host by bombing them all to hell. First I’m a bad American because I won’t say the “under God” part of the Pledge and because I call bullshit on the political jingoes who are trying to convince us that the only people who could possibly hate the U.S. are those whose sick and wizened little minds also hate the concept of freedom, and more recently I have fallen under suspicion because I display no flag. Think about the brilliantly perverse operative, a god of propaganda, whose idea that was, to promote the upcoming military engagement as being a referendum on the subject of freedom. This essentially reduces all substantive political discourse to the level of grunting. Are you in or are you out? Are you on our side, or the terrorists’ side? Are you a patriotic American who would die for your God-given freedom, or are you on the side of pure unadulterated turban-wearing evil? Forward, march! Onwards to freedom! Freedom -- like it’s the theme for our prom, and we all have to do our part to decorate the gym and assemble cute outfits and put red-white-and-blue icing on the cupcakes. Ohh I get so incensed. One of the diarists I read regularly – and I can’t remember right now who that was, so if it was you let me know and I will give you belated credit – noted that in his or her experience, the citizens who have been most eager to fly the flag this week are those with the most tenuous grasp of the circumstances surrounding the terrorist attacks, the ones least evolved from grunting, basically people who seem to have been looking for an excuse to honk the horn a lot and yell something out the windows as they drive, and “Yeeeahh! U.S.A!” will do as well as anything. The friend of a friend lives in an apartment directly below that of her landlord, and when she asked him to pull up his flag so that it didn’t obscure her window, he called her a Communist. It’s easy to put up a flag, as easy as it is to slap on a bumper sticker, but the gesture, as a gesture, is hollow. Here at the Widget, we have a flag hanging on the door that faces the elevator lobby. But what does it mean? Are we saying that we’re all citizens, that we all love America, that we all recite the Pledge word for word, that we hate terrorists, that we grieve for those who lost friends and family members last week, that we’d be willing to sacrifice ourselves to rid the world of the Taliban? The national dialogue, in the course of the last week and a half, has become almost not dialogue at all. Maybe the most important thing individuals can do to assert themselves in the world is to continue to think, always to think for themselves, but now the undifferentiated mass of Americans is expected to look up at the flag and grunt. And if I don’t display a flag, might I as well be wearing an invisible yellow star? Sorry to keep coming at you with the N-word, but keep in mind that the reason the Nazis came to call on Captain von Trapp was not that he was a peace activist or that he’d been overheard speaking in defense of the Jews, but that he failed to fly the swastika. The flag is not the whole story.

Guys: Please do the women of the world a favor and never, never lean across a table and look at your companion moony-like and say in a soft and indulgent, wondering voice, “You don’t even know how sexy you are.” That is *all* I am going to say – but please, for the love of humanity, don’t even try it.

Walking to my car this afternoon after a brief detour to Ozzie’s, I had the absolute A. Scott Gallowayest moment of the last few months. I could have done the Snoopy dance. But for now, the moment is mine, and I’m going to keep it to myself. Hope everyone has a swell weekend.