Hello sweetheart, I just finished reading a wonderful piece online, discovered serendipitously, that touches very closely on issues I've inchoately - and a bit anxiously - been thinking about in recent days - if the "online me" matches or even resembles the "real" me, how to sort them out - or put them together.

I'm very glad that you have a sense of the "real" me. I mean, we certainly don't know each other well (I wish I knew you better, I always liked you, but yes - you were always a background figure to me - how could you not be, given the circumstances, and great infrequency that we'd ever encounter each other - for an afternoon or a day, tops). But I write this blog - to you, mostly - and I feel that you know me better than anybody else - and that you know who I am. And you knew who I was - corporeally - way before you ever encountered my blog.

I'm feeling particularly incoherent at the moment, on this subject. Part of my excuse is that I feel very achey - why? Skeletomuscular, it feels like to me - now what supplement was it that I was supposed to take, according to Dr. O? I wasn't taking notes during my workout.

1.0 is interested in my online persona - but not in my actual self - who I evolved into, after I hit 17, 18, and beyond --- not in many years.

I was very very grateful and happy - and am to this day - for the friendship of Lenore... we met each other - initially as online personas only, with a shared interest in E.D. and the Secret Life of E.D., - and I had a chance to meet Lenore at the E.D. soiree in Amherst last month - an extraordinary experience, and in no small part, for my own psyche, due to the relief to find my corporeal person in tandem -- and fully accepted -- with my online persona -

Now I face the prospect of some involvement in a community setting, if of an improbable kind - I'm hardly 'high-church' - yet because of my musicality, and inherent spiritual leanings (even if not tending ever to the formally religious) makes some sense. So much of my life (or my mind) has been transpiring online with you -- and you both know my story very well -- that I suddenly find myself wondering how I'm ever going to explain myself to the quite naturally curious rector. I suppose it's very similar to the situation I face when I'm uncomfortably around a holiday table --- well I write, quite a lot, but it's all quite private, epistolary.

You'd think I was a creep. Or some other kind of awful person. Which I don't think I am.

I stopped by the supermarket yet again, in what feels to me now like an increasingly futile gesture, the more time passes. But I am absolutely determined, if I see that guy again, no matter how much time passes -- "it could be months, it could be years," as the Waterboys sing -- to reach into my wallet, pull out the tiny envelope addressed to "Mr. -?-" from "Belle," in my handwriting. Because he's a guy who's seen me in person... but has no idea of my online persona. And yet I don't feel afraid to show it to him - I'd like him to see it. Even if it turns out that he's unavailable and/or uninterested in every way - it doesn't matter. Or it would - whatever he might choose to do or not do after receiving such information - would be completely cool with me. It's just that sometimes my corporeal self wishes to reach out... or maybe it's my online self... or maybe I'm not describing it all accurately at all.

Will it be okay for an Emma Bovary to tickle the windpipes of a high-church ancient establishment that she's not quite at home in? The Rector had mentioned that they don't have much money to offer, but a bit (I can't even imagine what tiny amount it might be - I'm picturing it might cover a glass or two of Spanish white at a post-service brunch in town) - and my initial reaction was to reject that notion - obviously I'm not in it for any money (I had stopped by, by kismet! and whim! -- oh yeah, perhaps I should adjust some of my rhetoric -- oh but I can't) - but now I actually think it would be a good idea. Because then I would feel that I can quite credibly and creditably (depending on my musical ability & practicing) be their accompanist... without feeling that at the same time I need to absolutely be a member of the congregation. I'm not confirmed -- not in the Catholic faith, in which I was nominally raised (since my parents didn't attend church) - and certainly not in this one.

D knows my "real time" corporeal person... and no longer (as far as I know) looks at my blog, which is fine with me. So that's another bifurcation.

So again, I'm so glad, bifurcated as indeed you & I are, in so many respects, at least you have a sense of the merging of my personas, the real, & online. As I suppose I do of you -- on much much thinner stuff, my projections...