Real is the Last Taboo

Sometimes, the best writing you do isn't fit for public consumption.

Too much you have to sanitize and redact when it comes to that. Can't talk about other people the way you actually feel about them, or the way they make you feel.

Can't talk about your coping mechanisms without people judging you — or worse, moralizing to you about them.

Can't talk about struggles with money or work without them telling you how they think you're falling short or what job you should be doing instead.

Or your struggles without belief without them telling you how you're praying all wrong.

And while it's true that most of us are short on exogenous wisdom, we need unsolicited, unconsidered advice from strangers like we need a railroad spike to the forehead.

If we could write the way we think, if we could say it all, raw and unadulterated and pure as fresh blood, I like to think those folks would be quiet.

But we all know better.

Most people aren't here to listen. Precious few want to hear any voice that isn't their own. And nobody, drowning in the ocean of their own problems, wants to hear about someone else's pain.

Except the voyeurs. The voyeurs come for the train wreck, the dumpster fire, then take off if it ever goes out. They don't want to see you do better, because better is boring.

Writhing in agony? Now that's entertainment.

There are always a few real ones, the ones who care, or send a quiet email, or light up the notification on your DMs. They're mostly the ones who know real suffering from the inside out, and they offer what they can like they're inviting you to huddle under their broken umbrella in a downpour, barely big enough for two.

And you still can't take the shackles off. You still can't write it all out for them.

Bukowski's genius, if you want to call it that, was that he didn't care. He didn't mind looking bad, and he didn't trouble himself with whether the other people he wrote about looked bad either. He coughed up his raw, drunken, sex-fueled, tobacco-driven humanity and displayed it on a cheap folding table like some kind of lowlife trading cards.

But it was real, anyway. It was ugly in the way things are. And that's something.

Real is a rare commodity these days.

Real is the last taboo.

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