The Watcher Watching Herself

The idea of a blog. A web log. A ship's log. A ship's log was impersonal. Three knots. Ten knots, fifteen hundred, the wind, the stars, the waves. Thunder. All that. Fate and nature recorded and the little bark's progress along the vast indifference, matey. Now a blog where I record what's personal in an impersonal forum. But everything is personal now, exposed, web-cammed. I want to write about reactions to my Cancer Bitch debut on the radio, but it seems to be so much like a dog reporting on chasing its own tail. What everyone thinks of the dog chasing its tail. I met with an essayist yesterday who told me about a lizard that has such big horns that it clutches them while it's climbing and gets caught up in them, impeding its own progress. The lizard apparently doesn't realize that the horns are its own. The dog must realize that the tail is her own. There are nerves in the tail, after all. I heard a 1987 interview with Oliver Sacks yesterday on Fresh Air in which he talked about a man who disowned his own leg. Something in his brain had shifted so that he couldn't recognize his leg as his own. He saw it as other and ugly. It was not a part of him.