Just a quick note: I’ve been getting a lot of comment spam, so if you haven’t commented before your first comment may be held for moderation. Sorry, I don’t like to do it, but I just spent a whole afternoon deleting comments. (And please don’t even mention prescription drugs in my comments section — most of them are blacklisted.)

I just about thought that “Light Under the Floorboards,” as a weblog title, is a little bit too – pretentious? Sentimental? Well, that’s what I’m going with at least for the moment, and the reason is that it comes from two songs I absolutely love. One is about friendship, and one is about a serial killer who dressed as a clown.

I’ve been scraping little shavings off my ration of light
And I’ve formed it into a ball, and each time I pack a bit more onto it
I make a bowl of my hands and I scoop it from its secret cache
Under a loose board in the floor
And I blow across it and I send it to you
Against those moments when
The darkness blows under your door
-Bruce Cockburn, “Isn’t That What Friends Are For?”

And in my best behavior
I am really just like him
Look beneath the floorboards
For the secrets I have hid
-Sufjan Stevens, “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.”

When I first heard the Bruce Cockburn song, it took me about two months to be able to listen to it without crying. It’s about friendship, of course – and then, it’s also about writing. For those of us who read habitually, compulsively, who hasn’t felt that at some point or another?  You’re reading, and then, unexpectedly, you come across some ray of beauty and comfort and hope, and how did this person who lives hundreds of miles away, who might not even be alive any more, know? And you’re not alone any more, because of the words this total stranger is giving you.

That’s not advocating books that are all about puppies and sunshine and rainbows, though, because you can’t lie to people. They’ll know. They can tell the difference between real comfort and false comfort. False comfort is what tells you that you’re right and everyone else is wrong, you’ve been wronged terribly through no fault of your own because people just don’t understand.

That’s why the Sufjan Stevens quote is also about writing. I think that the kind of writing that gives any real comfort also requires the courage and clear vision to haul out the skeletons that are in your closet or under your floorboards, not with the intent to explain or exonerate yourself, but just for the sake of truth. I don’t want to write tell-all romans-a-clef about my traumatic childhood (no, I didn’t have one); I don’t want to stick to the literal truth, but I do want to draw on the emotional truths of my life.