If you’ve never done this before:

1. Dial Deutsche Bank/National Discount Brokers at 1-800-888-3999 (toll free in the U.S.)
2. Listen for option number 7.
3. Press 7 and listen.

Wow

Thanks to everyone who’s been e-mailing or IM’ing or commenting in response to my previous entry. I’m glad my words have been connecting with people. I’m getting a kick out of corresponding with some new bloggers and reading their blogs — that’s what this whole thing is all about, right? Seriously, it’s great to hear from people whom I don’t know, and I’m reading everything and trying to respond. So, thanks again — it means a lot.

We interrupt your regularly-scheduled TinManAngst™ to bring you the following Survivor-related thoughts.

Colby, Elisabeth, Keith and Tina. Tina, Elisabeth, Keith and Colby. Elisabeth and Colby and Tina and Keith… We’re going to be hearing a lot about them over the next two weeks. I’m sure they’ll be on the covers of Newsweek and TV Guide and given prominent consideration for next year’s Pulitzers, the Nobel Peace Prize, as well as the Emmys and Tonys and Grammies and Obies and Clios and Razzies and Bloggies. (Oh my!)

I’ve only seen five episodes of Survivor II, but when I haven’t been watching, I’ve been reading the great weekly recaps over at Salon. And now it’s feeling exciting and tense again. Isn’t it weird how it sneaks up on you? At first the place seems so crowded and chummy, all these people competing in teams to win immunity challenges, all this group fun. Yay, let’s jump off cliffs! Team spirit! And then the tribes merge, and then there are fewer and fewer people, and then there are six, and then five, and things seem quiet and desolate and bleak, and you’re on the edge of your seat and your eyeballs are glued to the screen.

But… not really. I mean, I’m trying to feel like I did last August. I really am. I want to feel it. Yet isn’t there something missing from these final episodes? Last time there was Richard and his cool, calculating determination. This time, there’s, who, Keith? As with most sequels, it just doesn’t seem quite as exciting this time around. If you watched it last summer, it was such a phenomenon; you didn’t know what was going to happen, or what it was going to be like, and the nervousness and tension and suspense you were feeling were so unexpected. And that final two-hour episode — my God, there had never been anything like it before on American television. It was all so new. Even now, whenever I hear the tones of that opening shofar, or whatever it is they play at the beginning, I’m inexorably pulled back to memories of sitting on the couch on warm Wednesday nights in the apartment where I lived last summer, wearing shorts and a t-shirt, eating a chicken-with-broccoli combination dinner from the local Chinese take-out place, wondering what was going to happen. (And then switching to NBC at 9:00 for repeats of “The West Wing.”)

So, it’s not quite the same this time around. But it’s still interesting. I was a little creeped out to hear Elisabeth call Rodger her “outback daddy,” but he does seem like a sweet guy. As for Visa, I guess it really is everywhere you want to be. Hey, honey! Let’s go to the Australian Outback! They got Visa! I’m just glad they didn’t actually show Tina shopping online, Wheel-of-Fortune style, buying five hundred bucks’ worth of ceramic cats and Quasar TVs and stuff from Amazon.com and Pets.com and PlugYourCompanyHere.com. And they set up an iMac? In the Australian Outback? Okay. Why not.

And at least there’s Colby. Mmm… Colby.

And my bet on next week’s surprise visitor is Richard Hatch himself. Maybe not, but that’s my guess.

So we’ll see what happens.

Now back to your regularly-scheduled TinManAngst.™

Why I Write

I have a particular vision of Heaven. In Heaven there’s a big library. In this library — along with every book ever published in any language — there’s a special place that consists of miles and miles of shelves of special books. There’s one book for every single human being who’s ever lived. Each book is sort of a cross between a daily journal, a biography, and a multimedia experience. It contains a narrative of that person’s entire life. You can step into any moment of that person’s life and read about what they experienced and did and felt on any particular day, from that person’s point of view. Or you can read it in narrative form. You can even experience any moment of that person’s life through that person’s eyes, as in Being John Malkovich.

When I was 12 years old I read this book, and I immediately decided I wanted to start keeping a diary. After I turned 13, my parents gave me one as a Hanukkah present. It was a big blank book with lined pages and a painted cover, and it had a lock and key. I wrote my first entry on January 2, 1987. Although I haven’t written every day — somtimes days will go by without writing, sometimes a few weeks, and, rarely, a few months — I’ve been keeping a journal ever since. After I filled that first book, I bought another blank book and filled it. And then another one. Eventually I decided to start using spiral notebooks, because they’re cheaper and you feel less intimidated by grand expectations when you write in them.

And then, just over three months ago, I began a blog. I don’t know why I started it. But this is kind of comical in retrospect. At any rate, I rarely write in my spiral notebooks anymore. Now I do most of my daily chronicling here.

In the preface to his own published diary, A Diary of the Century, Edward Robb Ellis writes that there should be an American Diary Depository, a place where people can have their diaries sent after they die. Then anyone who wants can go and read about their lives. Edward Robb Ellis died in 1998. I wonder if he ever read any online journals? I wonder what he would have thought about blogs?

Keeping an online journal is kind of like NASA’s Voyager. But instead of sending out the Brandenburg Concertos and the structure of a DNA molecule, we send our thoughts and feelings and perceptions out into the ether for others to stumble across. And you know what? It’s just as important. What one person thinks about one little thing on one particular day is just as important as the greatest accomplishments in the history of humanity. Because it’s those little things that mean we exist in the first place, that make existence worthwhile.

That’s why I’m a devoted chronicler of my life and of the things that have happened in it. Because I exist. Because someday I’ll be gone, and I want it possible to be said: He lived. He was here.