I censor myself...

There are drawbacks in being a public diarist. There is much which I could record in a notebook …material that is sensitive, embarrassing, crude, personal …which I cannot place here.

Which is unfortunate. It removes much of the power of a real diary. The role of a personal, handwritten journal (the kind that used to come with a lock on the cover) is often to be a kind of silent therapist. You place within it the darkest parts of your life. Your hatreds, fears, lusts…the name of the man you secretly wish to destroy (though you know he doesn't deserve it), the acts so foul that you cannot possibly admit you want to perform them. And it is safe to say these things in a journal. Safer even than it would be to speak them on the couch of the psychiatrist or in the church confessional. Because no one will ever know what you've written…save you, and God (assuming there is one).

And besides, some day, when the journal is full, you may toss it into the shredder. Or just pitch it into the trash. (Come, admit, no one will ever read the thing.) And then, those thoughts and sins are consigned forever to oblivion.

How different here in public. Here there is no oblivion. No genuine confession. No absolution. Here, sins would be forever enshrined. Perversions (of the body or the soul) would become your defining characteristic. People would remember you not for your attempts at the good but your admissions of the evil…evils which, truth be told, are present in us all. You would be different, and therefore damned, only because you were so gauche as to say that you had them.

So I restrain myself. I conceal. I censor. And that is for my benefit. But also for yours. You do not want to know.

Yet, I know, too, that mine is not really a popular opinion. As usual, I am the one who is out of step. I am the oddity, the crank, and the eccentric. I cruise the web and walk the aisles of my local bookstore, and I find there are many, many diarists and autobiographers for whom the barrier does not exist. They abandon the implicit privacy of the memoirist as easily as the progressive cartoonist breaks "the fourth wall," i.e., as though it were an act of daring.

And perhaps it is. Daring, I mean.

Yet, I wonder, at what point does confession become exhibitionism? Where does the diarist leave off, and where begins the dirty, sick old man in the proverbial raincoat, pants below his knees, for whom a sad fulfillment comes only in a flash, the pathetic shock, and the waving of his limp little willy at a cold and indifferent world?