We are all Spalding Gray

I have to be honest: In the car on the way home, when NPR's Robert Siegel intoned that they had identified the body fished from the East River as Spalding Gray, the first image that popped into my mind was Briscoe and Green standing over the body: "Not another floater," Lenny says. "He sho' is gray," Eddie chimes in.

But that's a disservice to Spalding Gray, who, had he been my age, would have been a blogger for sure. After all, Gray's fame and fortune came from doing what we bloggers do every day. Gray pretty much defined what it meant to be a monologuist, sort of an East Coast Garrison Keillor, or perhaps a 20th Century Benjamin Franklin.

Gray was not well these last few years; a horrible accident in Ireland a couple of years back severely disfigured him and threw him into bouts of deep depression. Not that his life was all roses and light before that--Gray's mother committed suicide when he was young, casting a pallor over his life that left a pretty melancholy bent to everything he did.

After repeated attempts at suicide, it seems like he finally succeeded in jumping from the Staten Island Ferry last January.

I was never a huge Spalding Gray fan, though--I appreciated his work, and I'm pretty sure I saw Monster in a Box, even--despite my respect for his work in defining a genre that I, in some ways, call my own.

Since I've been blogging, almost a year now, I have rediscovered the long form. The reading I had to do to finish my creative writing degree (yeah, I know, the only degree less useful than philosophy or communications) was essentially a monologue: a thirty minute (or so) essay. In fact, that last year in college, I could barely do anything in less than 2000 words: It was tough even leaving voicemail for a professor.

Anyone who's been following my blog since the beginning knows that I have brevity issues. Now, I haven't started getting up--or, as Gray would do, sit at a table on stage--and drone on for an hour and a half. (Though, I keep getting spam email from a self-publishers' group in Chicago looking for readers.) But this blog--any blog at all, really, that features any amount of personal narrative--is the cyber equivalent of monologue. Talk, talk, talk is all we do.

And we too, at heart, are minimalists, we bloggers. Like Gray, we don't need much--nothing more than some blogging software and perhaps a blogonym. Many of us even have that calculated sip of water (anyone for "Heh!" or "Indeed!"?) Gray was famous for, that notebook open on the table. No, we generally don't have the kind of immediate audience Gray had, though occasionally we are blessed with comments. And no one would even think about calling most of us avante garde.

Some of the most powerful and touching and thought-provoking posts I have read of late have not been of the political diatribe type, nor of the news analysis type, but of the personal. Just the other day, for example, my new friend Bobby over at Bark Bark Woof Woof talked about standing on line at the DMV. Rook is constantly going on and on about his travails with The Girlfriend™ and the Fuskers™. Kos is that much more human when he writes about the kid or Baseball Day. The Spacewaitress has been waxing philosphical on her life these days for certain. Who among us was not on the edge of our keyboards hoping for Steve Gilliard's safe return to blogging, or excited beyond compare to learn even the slightest personal tidbit about Atrios? I won't even mention cat blogging.

There is no question when it comes to us bloggers: Our lives are the stuff of our writing. In other words, we are all Spalding Gray.