I was scrolling through old messages here and noticed a comment had been posted on one I'd written maybe ten days ago. Funny, I hadn't noticed it before. Turned out it was from someone in Brazil. He said something complimentary, then gave me a link to his website. After doing a little linguistic analysis (hmmmm, a lot of the words are like Spanish, but a lot others aren't) I figured it was Portuguese. Clicking on his profile, I learned he was from Brazil.

This raises interesting questions. I've purposely not put this blog "out there," (like making it public and searchable on Blogger) but instead have just given the address to friends and family. Yet people occasionally "drop in" from around the world. How do they do that? The mysteries of the internet, search engines, and what have you...

Actually, come to think of it, I think I did once try finding my blog, or a posting, or something, on Technorati (the number one blog search engine) and found it. So maybe it's not as private as I thought.

But that's cool. When writing, I keep in mind anybody could be reading it--now or in the future. While, at the top of this page, I explain that the philosophy of my blogging is to continue the habit of personal letter writing that I started in early life, nevertheless I'm conscious that this medium ain't the same thing. So I try to be personal without telling secrets that ought to be kept private.

The person I heard who expressed this distinction most recently, believe it ot not, was Alan Alda. He was being interviewed on a Canadian show about his autobiographical book which included some deeply personal material. To do "art," he said, you have to be personal. But that doesn't mean you are obliged to disclose damaging family secrets. This is a tremendously important distinction nowadays, as we regularly watch, or hear, so many embarassing public confessions.

Where, and how, do we draw the line? The Bible includes a lot of embarassing material about its heroes, of course, yet somehow it seems right. Flawed heroes they may be, but heroes they remain. The same has been true in any number of excellent memoirs or biographies I've read, such as Charles Colson's famous book Born Again in which he spilled the beans on his shenanigans in the Nixon White House. He didn't try making himself out better than he was, yet we didn't come out feeling "there was something not quite right about that, namely, too much information!" That's the feeling I get again and again when flipping channels and seeing somebody spilling their guts on Oprah or Larry King or wherever. My reaction is, "Yuck! Get me outta here..."

So there, in a nutshell, you have my personal blogging philosophy. I hope I've not crossed the line too often myself. If I have, that might explain in part why my regular readership comes down to, from what I can tell, um, like, three or four people.

But hey! that's okay. They are three or four very good people (and meanwhile I'm havin' a ball...).