It took a bit of chutzpah on my part to write something that the public could read. I don't know who's sitting out there in the Web, looking at this. Are they kind or psychotic? Are they highly judgemental or easygoing? Is what I'm putting here worthwhile? It's hard to describe how I felt when I signed up for this blog. Queasy? A intense, smooth wave of anxiety? This is a feeling that is not in the least akin to stage fright. I guess it's closer to something more elemental: letting myself, even in this small way, become vulnerable to an awful lot of unknown people.
A form of torture in the old days was to pull the intestines out of the person while they were still alive. The gut is exquisitely sensitive and to have it exposed like that would be horrible and cruel. I hope that my fears of exposing my own "gut feelings" to the world here, in an arena filled with strangers to me, are not justified.