I do not use my writing here as confessional. I do not demand you buy things. I do not write because I insist you agree with my viewpoints.
I write here because I can and sometimes because I must. I write here because it is the place where I do not write about the other things which fill a day. I value this, my Fol-De-Rol, because everyone needs a place for their mental hinterland to live. Before we wrote online, we wrote in diaries or journals. Or we went to the pub, or called around to a pal, or spent hours on the phone to a schoolfriend. In all those places we were being ourselves.
We were ourselves then. I am myself here. Does that mean we aren’t ourselves the rest of the time? No. I am myself when I am at my office. I am myself when playing with my children. But I am also other things, I am an employee, a lawyer or a dad. I am someone else’s something else.
Writing here I am nobody’s anything.
I am just what I feel like, just as I am writing it.
We all need a Fol-De-Rol.