Outing Kep

Dear Ocean readers,

So Kep is me.

I mean really me. A literary construct, true, but not a totally fictionalized one. Everything he has said, I have thought or felt at some point in recent times. His events have been my events -- from getting toe rubbing (but not really toe rubbing) thrown in my face, and pining for a nick name, to listening to female orgasm talk in mixed company (mid-May, just as Kep said). The people in his life are variously drawn from the people – friends, loves, all important people – in my life, though with flipped genders and statuses, mostly. His stupid dilemmas have been my dilemmas as well (milky lunches, bitche-y holes in the wall, misplaced over-inflated degrees, comments on newsstories, all of it).

A couple of Ocean readers wrote to tell me that they found Kep annoying. “Once a bastard, always a bastard,” said one. Maybe. So I guess that makes me the female version of one, since I think that I’m capable of sulking at the store clerk and being culturally confused and annoying, and manifesting all sorts of misplaced behaviors when the world feels mean and rotten. And the emails I can write then! Yeah! Oh, believe me, Kep was a tame dude by comparison.

A far larger number said that they were entertained. Some even recognized the not-so-thinly-veiled sadnesses in Kep’s posts (three separate people picked up on the sadness of writing daily and losing my reach of so many close to me people who read, but assume that they owe no message in return).

A few kept saying Kep writes too much about me. I think if I were asked to jump into someone’s personal (as opposed to commentary) blog, I’d feel inclined to do the same. Wait. That’s just what I did! That’s right, I forgot. Kep is me (as is regular joe, tadpole, nina – hello Sybil!). It’s a tough assignment: no one knows or cares about you, yet you’re there, helping your pal entertain readers who are totally not used to you. Or rather -- me as him.

Of course, the vast majority of Kep-readers was silent, just as it is in regular daily posting. One has to get used to the silence that follows blogging. So I flipped on the meter for the week that Kep was writing. Perversely, Kep numbers kept shooting up, even as in general, Ocean numbers move up very incrementally. At some point I had to wonder whether the Kep voice is a better voice than my regular writing voice. [There is some delicious irony in the fact that, even if I wanted to -- and I don't -- I could not write as directly about myself as Kep wrote about me!]

Whatever it did for you, it was good for me to release a side that was less audience-driven, that could write crudely, childishly, realistically, that could more freely deal with the brassier side of any issue.

Why did I do it? For any number of reasons, you may find yourself facing a set of days where you cannot keep writing in the same way that you have in the past. You don’t want to pick anything from your current state to put on the blog. You don’t want readers to read you face-on. During such times you can step back and look at yourself from some other vantage point. That’s what I did.

Disclaimer: Any resemblance to another was intentional. You would not have been fooled unless you had a vision of someone who also would be trying hard not to sound like him or herself. The toughest part? Not to inadvertently insert my usual (foreign-born) language idiosyncrasies. You would have guessed right away then. Though I did post a caveat that Kep might try to mock my Eastern European tone, in case I absolutely could not keep it out of his posts.

God, I miss him already!

Kiss and make up for all those who felt offended by the Kep week? Here, some flowers for you to calm you down: