Sometimes I sip it, sometimes I spill it, but regardless of its outcome, the tea here is piping hot. That’s because I put it in the kettle and don’t take it off the stove until it whistles, all sputtering steam and screaming from painful heat. This is the way you get to the truth of the matter, the way you force it all out. Putting oneself on exhibition and show in a public website is treacherous business at best, especially when everyone is so ready with an opinion or critique. Dragging friends and family and former lovers into the storyline is risky too, even if their influence and import in my life is unquestioned. When tea gets spilled, it can be an awful mess – but a glorious one, steeped equally in history and histrionics.
My journey here hasn’t been all pretty poses and posies, as evidenced from these photos taken about two decades ago, in which I had a goatee for God’s sake. Mistakes have been made. Stumbles have been taken. Failure has become an art form. But so has living – and in a way this blog is a living and breathing work of its own art – a new form of expression in the time of social media. Sometimes messy, sometimes too emotional and personal, and sometimes just an utter disaster, all the foibles and fumbles of life’s imperfect zig-zagging have formed the backbone of its two-decade trajectory. Throughout it all, I’ve managed to document the days in regular fashion, treating this space as some sort of online diary, a repository of what has happened – the good, the bad, and the goatee-ugly.
Tea time has been held on the regular, and for a number of years I posted at least once a day for 364-days each year (we always went dark on 9/11). That sort of consistency takes discipline and effort, but this has been a labor of love, something I’d do for two or two million hits. In the end, it was more of an exercise in journal-like analysis – a place where I could seek out refuge or solace in words, in putting things down just to get them out of my head. To that end, it has and continues to serve a purpose in my life.
The beauty of it being a public place is that others have found something that resonates with them, and so my tea has become tea for at least two. Every once in a while I’ll hear from someone who wants to say hello and say that they too have felt what I expressed in a post or photograph. At those times, it feels like we have shared something, that we are not entirely alone.
