This morning a freelance photographer came to the house to get a few shots of that one woman who lost her job because of her website, oh, about two centuries ago. His instructions were to take pictures of “the blogger Heather B. Strong,” and he asked me what the hell a blogger was.
“You don’t know?” I asked hopefully.
“No, no I don’t,” he answered as he unpacked the most gigantic lens for a digital camera I have ever seen. In a slow-motion three second montage I saw the financial ruin of my family, frame by frame, at the hands of Nikon spies who were sitting in a room somewhere watching this all unfold on a closed-circuit television and yelling at the screen, “WHERE’S THE HUSBAND? PROLONG THE SESSION UNTIL THE HUSBAND GETS HOME. WE NEED THE HUSBAND TO SEE THAT LENS.”
I tried to come up with the simplest explanation of a blog so I said, “It’s just a personal — ” and then I stopped myself and changed directions. “You know how when someone barfs and they can’t believe that the green peppers they ate in a burrito last night just came up whole, completely undigested up through the esophagus and back out their mouth, and the first thing they want to do even before wiping their mouth is tell someone about it? You might want to just pretend you never heard that word.”
“Is that what you do?”
“God, no. What I do is far worse. Trust me, preserve your innocence.”