An identifying theme

Picasso, Woman with a Mirror,
date not found on Google but I'd guess the 1950's

When three or more mouse clicks say the same thing in the same morning, that means way opens. Post about it.

Following one link to another I found this beautifully written memoir by "Alex," who can completely speak for himself:

My name is Alex. I guess an introduction is in order but I don't really know who I am. Actually Alex isn't really my legal name so even in my first words this starts to get a bit complicated.

I am a student, and if you ask any of my classmates who I am, you will probably hear that I am a 19-20 year old boy, well-read for my age, openly gay and that I am someone almost everybody likes but nobody knows. If you ask my mother, the picture may be somewhat different. I believe that she will tell you that I am a 27-year-old married mother of three.

Read the rest. Like all good writing it will tell you about the writer and you and humans and sorrow and joy and life and make you feel that you know more about all of that because you spent five minutes in front of a computer screen, just reading.

On the fiction front I loved the Wired essay by Lore Sjöberg, Resting in Pieces. Not sci-fi, not mere alternative history, it's more a musing on roads not taken from the standpoint of someone we would not care about, had it not been written just this way. I loved the moments I spent reading it.

And then I read a comment on another blog. I won't link though the blog deserves it aw hell it's Drifty, I'll link after all since the subsequent comments are grand and respond without troll-feeding. The commenter quoted below imho does not need encouragement. The commenter called us bloggers

"wounded birds, and the psychotically and physically maimed who need to pound it out at the keys, for some relief.

Does ANYONE who blogs not have some great personal psycho/sexual/gender adversity to overcome that I don't have to hear about?

Is there NO one out there, that's just normal?

Why sure there is, commenter, and you can find them by doing a google blog search for "kittens," "my cute baby nephew," or "cookie recipe."

One can write well about those things, but really: hold up any novel or memoir or political tract worth reading and there on the title page is a word "by" followed by the name of a wounded bird. And there in the pages is, we hope and pray, a bit of great personal psycho/sexual/gender adversity.

See, you can be an artist, hell you can be the blogosphere's Pablo Picasso. Or you can be a commenter who is looking for "normal" where staring at you through your screen is something so much better. Your choice.

I've posted this song before but it just seems so, well, apropos: