Brain Barf: The Beginnings of Letters I Shall Never Write

Dear Heather, My parents met you this past weekend at a Christian Faculty Retreat, and suggested that I contact you with my questions about blogging. I have questions about blogging. Because all my life I thought I wanted to be a writer, but never really got to spend all that much time on it, and now I'm 34 years old and hardly know how to write more than a paragraph or two on any given subject. I have some natural ability, which has probably only held me back because I haven't had to develop the congruent discipline. Complain, complain, whine...

Dear David, If I ever find your email address, I may drop you a line and go into all sorts of rambling detail beginning with how I first started listening to your wife, Sarah's, music in college and thought it wasn't very good at first. The first time I heard her CD it was on a cheap CD player, the kind that plugged into a cassette player, a cassette player that had been inexpertly spliced into the wiring of my dad's car. It was a tape deck that was clamped to the underside of the hatch-back's center console, not sophisticated in any way and with terrible speakers. You know I was grateful to have it, the cassette player I mean, but I was on my way to a building site, the day I first heard your wife's CD, a building site where I was supposed to be taking photos for a photo journal, assigned in a class that was about Technical Drawing and Light Construction for Interior Design students. Only later did I realize that the reason I didn't think it was very good was because it was in fact very good, only something I had not been prepared by my other listening to enjoy, particularly that Victoria Williams song, "Love," which I don't mind telling you was strange the first half a dozen times I heard her sing it. Later my husband, a terrible music snob, and a jazz player, somehow agreed that of the music I listened to before I met him, Sarah Masen's second CD, Carry Us Through, was among the good ones. In other words, I read your book because of a vicarious relationship I have with your wife's music, and now I want to know why you do what you do, and maybe who else does it, because while I didn't much enjoy your political commentary, I liked your book very, very much.

Most of this came out of me in a rush sometime last week, and while these are messages I shall never send to the parties to whom they are addressed, I am glad I wrote them because they relieved some of the pressure I was feeling to communicate with others who are doing things that I may someday get the chance to do. Maybe someday I will actually write that letter to Lauren Winner that I've been thinking about ever since I first read her material on confession in Girl Meets God.