Doing the “Diary” has been a perverse and profound pleasure. As I’ve gone about my business, a critical awareness of the broadcast potential of my experience has haunted me like a tiny, implanted TV executive. Someone–maybe Microsoft–should market the Diary Experience as an Internet product, a vanity-published Truman Show of the spirit. The wealthy would outbid each other into seven figures for the chance to be featured. It is both therapeutic and beautifully crazy to write your life on the Internet. As a wannabe film actor, of course, this is what I want to be doing–having strangers watch me from very close up as I do apparently private things. (A small courtesy fee only heightens the exhibitionist’s enjoyment.)
The point is: Publish or perish. As my best friend put it: I communicate or I die. Love is someone who wants to read your diary every day. God would be the one who reads everyone’s diary. Immortality is when you’ve made your point. So, as they say in sunny California, thanks for listening. Of course, I’ve been lying to you the whole time, my psychic friends, giving you a sanitized and probably maudlin After School Special of my inner life. Your Slate subscription doesn’t buy you snuff footage of my soul, nor would you want to know exactly what image illuminated my backbrain as I reached out slowly and …
Sean Gullette,
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