I have rarely–oddly enough–been asked who’s my favorite blogger.
My favorite blogger, from the first day I found her blog until this very day, today, is the once-famous, always wonderful Michele Catalano. She used to run a blog called “A Small Victory” which, to me, was a constant source of inspiration. It still is, or the memory of it anyway. She was brilliant. She could make me laugh, she could make me cry, she was rock and roll, and she was definitely a chick who kicked ass and took names. She also did great things, like a little project called Trooptrax that no one seems to remember but they should, sending music to troops over in Iraq and Afghanistan so they’d have music and know people back home care. I had a mad crush on this woman, still do. I would be her creepy stalker if she’d let me. 
At some point she started getting more and more erratic, then suddenly one day she up and quit. I knew a little about her personal life and that explained some of it, but it didn’t explain everything. She kept writing in other forums, other places, mostly now about music and family life, having shut down “A Small Victory” permanently.
Finally she explained why. This was why.
These days, I feel almost exactly like that. Not the same, but close.
While politically my views have not shifted all that much–mellowed a little, but still very much in the Joe Lieberman/Scoop Jackson/John McCain mold, liberal on some things, centrist on others, quite hawkish on defense, still a big supporter of what we’re doing in Iraq and Afghanistan–I understand hers have. And you know, I’m OK with that, because one thing Michele never was was a fake or a phony. Crazy? Different question. But not a fake.
And in a world of fakes and phonies and self-promoting posers, that’s a real treasure. She may feel like she cracked up, may have been in the bottom of depression and drink and a life she didn’t want–been there, done that–but she was still real.
John Eddy recently reminded me of one of her best lines, about parenting: it’s not a direct quote (her archives are gone, dammit), but it was something along the lines of, “When my son grows up, the cops may catch him with a pound of cocaine and a dead hooker in the trunk, but he’ll damn well be saying ‘please,’ ‘thank you,’ ‘yes sir’ and ‘no ma’am’ to the officers as they take him away.” How can you not love someone who writes like that?
But when I look at her “goodbye to all of that” statement, and why she quit political blogging and shut down “A Small Victory,” I can understand it. It is very difficult to dance out here in the mind field taking stances and arguing with people, having thousands of people reading you and wanting a piece of you and wanting to praise or condemn you at every turn, questioning your motives, questioning your ideological purity, insulting you, demeaning you, or just wanting you to scream with them at whatever they’re screaming about, especially when they suddenly realize you were never on their “side,” you were just saying what you thought at the time.
Unlike Michele, I won’t shut down this blog. But it has to be a place where I can open up the front page and not be afraid of what I’m going to find there with my name on the top of the page, or don’t look back (too often) and say “man, I’m ashamed of that.” I have to exert strong editorial control, and I haven’t figured out what “strong editorial control” means exactly yet–although it’s firming up in my head. What I’m thinking at this point is telling contributors that they are still contributors, but they have to run things past me first, and furthermore, certain topics are just off the table because I said so, and I will not put up with any grousing or recriminations.
And I’m just not going to get into it with people anymore: if I’m your target I’m just not playing with you.
By the way, Michele still writes a bunch of places, for publication and just for the internet, mostly about parenting, family, and music. I won’t link them right now because, well, I don’t need people who are mad at me following her around (and there are people who do that, it’s weird but they do). But I still love everything she writes. Even though her kids are delinquents and her favorite bands all suck.
