Birth

Alright, since all of you out in blog-space have given me such great input (well, um, not really...but it's only been a day), I will lead, first with the story of my blog's birth.

Lake Allison was discovered on May 7, 2004 while I was homeless, "couch-surfing", as one could call it gently. Never without my little plaid suitcase, I was fully at the mercy of my friends (deepest thanks) and non-hateful relatives for a piece of soft couch or floor to crash on and a few scraps of meatless something to eat. (Awww..are you misty-eyed, yet?)
For many nights, however, I was camped out on the living room couch at my dad's house. (My youngest sister had comandeered my old bedroom.) So there I'd be at night: alone with no room of my own, my stuff in boxes in the garage, no transportation, the suburban quiet stinging my eardrums. It's no surprise this time in my life was also the height of my psychosis. I was hallucinating and having a whole host of magic delusions that I believed in wholeheartedly.
Er..pardon my tangent. I guess the point here is that my blog was born when I had nowhere else to call "mine". I latched my drifting spirit tightly onto my corner of cyberspace. It was something real for me at a time in which my reality had blurred, in which my perceptions had betrayed me.

For my early entries, I had no audience in mind except for myself and perhaps a few close friends I had sent the Lake Allison link to. Thus, the tone of my writing was snippy and self-indulgent. The content was mainly one-liners which refered to inside-jokes. Quotes and links slapped up without much grounding context. I was writing in a typical online journal voice. Ripping open my virtual trenchcoat and verbally "flashing" on the screen. "Me-me-I-I-I did this, I said that, look at meee! Today, I bla bla bla...I'm so cool."
Until:

Allison: While doing a google search on my book, checking to see if any new reviews have appeared, I ran across your blog. Thanks a ton for listing it as one of your favorite books. And look at the company I'm in! Shit. Anyway, thanks. I was in Chicago last weekend and saw you and a bunch of other Columbia folks at BEA, but as I started making my way toward all of you to say hello, you were summoned and took off running. So...a belated hello. Hope this finds you well. Enjoy the scorching Chicago summer.
Cheers, John
P.S. -- Do you really want to post your phone number on your blog?

Woahh! What the fuck?!

Thursday, June 17, 2004
Did you know that this blog will appear on search engine searches? I thought it could only be viewed by those I sent the link to. I had my phone number and location on here, in addition to gushing mounds of personal information, arranging me easily stalkable. The common sense fairy doesn't leave much under my pillow. But how unsettling....that anybody could stumble upon this..the cops, my family, that guy who was barfing under my window, last night. Ex-boyfriends, kids from school. Hell, even John McNally could see this. Imagine the horrors!

John McNally is a writer who was at Columbia College for Story Week, last Spring. I had just read his The Book of Ralph, and liked it, and gave it a mention in the book section of my Lake Allison profile. And he found it. This shocked me into a broader sense of audience, but also a new need for censorship. From mid-June on, though I still did write primarily about myself, Lake Allison being a personal blog about..well, me, I tried to elaborate more upon events and thoughts that I felt readers from the non-me webworld would find engaging. I began to integrate different forms in my posts, such as list, fictional instance, poem and letter.

I found that, once my entries were a bit less alientating to the reader, people would actually leave comments...

Which is what I would like you to do, right now! Leave a comment in response to my post, about the birth of your own blog/online journal, telling me to go fuck myself, anything!