This is the first day that posts for my Estrangements blog will be put only on the Typepad blog. Setting up the blog here was my first goal for 2006. The posts prior to January 1, 2006 and that are listed in the Typepad archives for recent months in 2005 were originally written on the LiveJournal blog for Estrangements from July 2005 to December 31, 2005. The LiveJournal posts have been copied and pasted to the Typepad archives.

For those who have visited Estrangements.com
in the past and have been reading the blog, you already know this
information but for those who are new to the Estrangements blog on
Typepad, you might not have read enough of Estrangements to have a clue
that this day in January 2006 is the first day of the Estrangements
blog on Typepad.

Past entries to the blog are in three places: on Estrangements.com from 2001 to July 2005, on LiveJournal
from July to December 2005, and on Typepad from January 1, 2006 with
the LiveJournal posts copied to the Typepad archives. Clear? As mud?
Anyway, this entry is the first entry to the Estrangements blog that is
solely on Typepad.

For first timers, welcome to the Estrangements blog! For old timers, welcome to the new digs!

In order to respond to posts on the blog, you need to be a registered member of Typepad.
Registering is easy, free, and comes with no obligations although
perhaps Typepad has some Terms of Service that lets them kick you off
if you do something terribly objectionable. My memory is not so good
that I can recall what the Terms of Service are. I’m sure that it isn’t
anything like having to give them your firstborn child if you violate
the TOS. Although perhaps you would prefer to have them take your
firstborn child? I never know. (Note: In late April 2006 I removed the requirement to be a registered member of Typepad to post.)

If you do respond to posts because you would like to straighten me
out and make me fly right or if you want to award me a Nobel Prize or
something, your posts will not appear until after I have read them and
approved them. This is because of the nature of the subject of
estrangements. The subject comes with a lot of baggage for most people.
Emotions ride high.

People whose circumstances make them identify with others in my life
from whom I am estranged can react to me as though I am indeed their
nasty reviled relative. I can assure them that I am not but it’s
sometimes hard for them to believe. It’s so easy to dump on me all the
stuff that they can’t dump on their relative. On the other hand people
who identify with me in a positive manner generally react calmly, even
if they are feeling a lot of pain. And my daughter? You can guess which
of those camps she falls into and I hope that you got it right on the
first try.

This blog irritates the heck out of her and she would like to
straighten me out and make me fly right and if she could, she would
spend considerable time here trying to make me do so according to her
rules. If she would learn to argue in a manner where two people could
get something accomplished, I could let her respond to posts but
calling me names, reviling me, complaining about things that she says I
did 20 years ago that I can’t remember, and telling me that she doesn’t
want to talk to me …. again ….. isn’t productive. If she ever wants
to have a conversation with me where she can bring herself to stop
denigrating me in every sentence, she can let me know through email.
Until then, it is fine with me that she doesn’t talk to me.

In 1995 we didn’t get anywhere in our dialogue with each other.
Nothing has changed since then. If you would like a taste of how the
dialogue goes, visit the comments section of the Listening post on LiveJournal. (Scroll down because the first person to post as anonymous is not my daughter. My daughter is the other
anonymous.) (If you are using a Mac and Internet Explorer for Macs, my
Comments on LJ show up as vertical columns of words. It displays
normally in other browsers. If you use a Mac, use Safari or Foxfire to
read the Comments.) That is the first "conversation" that we’ve had in
10 years and it is so remarkably similar to the dialogue that took
place then. It’s a different kind of nostalgia. Not the kind that makes
you wipe a tear from your eye in fond memory. It’s more like
remembering when you burnt your hand on the stove. I’ve wondered since
I froze the Comments on the Listening post if she has wiped the froth
from her lips yet. I hear they have shots for that condition but it’s
probably too late for shots.

Okay, enough wise guy remarks at her expense. I will have more to
say on the human condition of Estrangement as the year progresses as I
have for the last five years. I have some new ideas in mind on how to
portray aspects of this condition.

Estrangements, the blog and the website, is primarily about
estrangements in families between blood relatives. It is less about the
estrangements between former lovers, even though that is such a common
form of estrangement. What brought me to designing and maintaining the
website, Estrangements.com, were the estrangements between myself and
blood relatives and then, secondarily or thirdly, the other
estrangements in my life. The most painful estrangement has been the
one with my daughter but once that happened, I had to take a look at
estrangement throughout my own life and that of others. It is a
condition that, like the fire that burns down the neighbor’s house, I
always expected to happen to someone else, like Roseanne and Demi Moore
and the homeless person on the street, and not to me.

Estrangements, the website, has the lists of links of celebrities
and others who have experienced estrangement, the links on information
about psychological conditions involved in some who become estranged,
links to support and discussion groups, links to articles, lists of
books and movies, and the blog from 2001 to 2005. Estrangements, the
weblog, has my own story of estrangements and my writings on various
issues that relate to estrangement. My own story is just that, my own
story, Others who were in my family have their own stories too and
their stories would differ from mine. Their stories are their stories.
I am capable of telling my own story of my own experience. I am not
privy to the internal lives and perceptions of the others in my story.

Even if we were all on good terms, I wouldn’t be privy to that
information. We are all encased in our own packages and can’t know
exactly what it is like to see through the eyes and walk in the shoes
of another person. We can try but it is impossible. Great novelists can
be good at it but still, no one really knows what the exact interior
life is like of another. We can guess. We can approximate. We can hear
it described. We can extrapolate from our own experience but we never
really know. So we can each tell our own tale and if we dare to try to
tell another’s, then we had best tread lightly because we operate with
incomplete information.

By the way, all of this that I write here, my daughter calls "BS".
She is scornful, contemptuous, and derogatory. Did I mention that she
doesn’t talk to me? Unless I let her respond on the blog. She assumes
that she knows my interior experience and that she knows it better than
I do. Even though we haven’t been close for a lot longer than I
realized ten years ago.

The story of my own estrangements is MY experience. I speak for no
one but myself. No one else can speak for me. As for my other writings
and drawings in the blog, they are my opinion and my expression of
themes of estrangement. The cartoons are not meant to be a specific
person. The characters in them are generic and are based on my life
experiences, on stories I have been told, on composites of people in
the roles that they live, and are not meant to be specific people.
However, they may remind you of people that you knew or know. But they
are not those people. They are cartoon drawings of human beings caught
in the drama of being human and, sometimes, caught in the human
condition of estrangement.

Happy New Year and Welcome to the Estrangements blog on Typepad!

Ginny … who is also known as Snicks