MORE THAN WORDS

"I was censored," I laughed when a friend asked me last night, "What happened?"

This friend happened to be reading SHLOG.COM in the hour and ten minutes that a lengthy post about Gospel Music Week in Nashville was up for viewing. An hour and ten minutes after it went live Rocketown's publicist, also a friend of mine whose opinion I sometimes ask for and respect, said it came across as "whiny", "arrogant" and "hypocritical".

Ouch.

I pulled it immediately, knowing that I wasn't writing from a whiny place, was not feeling particularly arrogant, and believing wholeheartedly that I was not a hypocrite. I've been all those things, rarely all at once, but I wasn't when I wrote the post in question.

I pulled it. And I got asked why.

I trust my publicist. She's never steered me wrong before. And even though SHLOG.COM was paid for by me and is maintained by me and not my label or friends, their opinions matter. So I pulled the post and it's been saved as a draft ever since, waiting revision or deletion.

I value her criticism in part just because she gave it. Most people kiss my butt, not by telling me I'm great but by not telling when I'm not. There's a real shortage of people in a soft rock star's life who'll shoot straight with him. She does. And she shoots hard. Hard enough to convince me others would have had similar thoughts on the post even if they'd never tell me.

So the post is gone. And it should be.

The problem is that in that post's hour and ten minute little life span it was read by Third Day's touring posse, discussed on their bus, batted about friends' and fans' offices, printed out in a publishing company cubicle, passed around homes and dorm rooms and linked to twelve times. Twelve times! That has got to be record. And of those I've talked with who did the linking, batting and reading none of them had negative things to say about it or me. They got it, or said they did, laughed hard and got the bigger point I intended to make. No mention of whininess, arrogance or hypocrisy.

How can this be? How can it be that so many people saw this one post so differently - one group finding "inspiration" and something to "laugh my #$$ off" about and others (for surely my publicist would not have been alone) wishing it had never been written.

Perspective.

I'm realizing more and more, the older and grayer I get, that truth is a squirrelly wriggly thing. Perception really is reality on many matters. And what affects perception more than perspective - where you're sitting, where you sat? It can alter the colors on a canvas, the shape of the human form painted upon it. It can make objects seem larger than they are and turn sentences prickly that were penned with humor or stoicism.

Perspective.

And this is what I loathe about blogs, about e-mails and books. Perspective is king, bias rules, when words stand alone without the extra definitions faces and bodies and tone bring them in real human conversation. Printed words stripped of eyebrows and flailing hands, or slumped shoulders and puffed out chests, of red face or tear streaked cheeks - they're too shape-shifting, too malleable, too left to the interpretation of the reader. And they can therefore easily offend or provoke when they want to merely describe. They can bore when they were born to shout scandal.

Wordsmiths of course - authors, poets, some song-writers and, yes, publicists - assume sometimes that everyone uses words as well as they do. They assume - I assume, and maybe we all do at times - that the meaning we hauled away from a paragraph was precisely what it's writer intended. That would be nice: everyone able to communicate to all people exactly what they intend at all times. Truth is though that very few of us these days, in a world swirling with shorthanded e-mails and Instant Messages coming and going like trains to and from Grand Central Station really craft anything written any more. We settle for short I-know-what-I-meant-to-say-and-so-will-they communication.

And few of us truly read anymore either. Not skimming. Not skating across a paragraph that's too long to bother with. READING. Savoring every word. Putting ourselves in the author's shoes. Thinking critically. Feeling what the writer felt. Reading again.

And again.

I don't take the time to read thoroughly or write clearly often enough.

And that's dangerous. I'm finding out. It's dangerous because of perspective. Our dictionaries differ, influenced by our past and present living. Our affections, our hates, our geography and upbringing, our faith, race, economics and education all color our interpretation of every word we read, with nothing else but the words themselves up for interpretation. No tone. No place and time. No expression. Just words easily recast by every reader into a new meaning.

And it's only getting worse. Read any good blogs lately? Really? When's the last time you saved an e-mail because it was such a masterpiece? No. We're lazy. Or maybe not lazy - maybe we're just in a hurry. We're thinking fast, writing fast, and deciding fast what someone else who thinks fast and writes fast meant when they wrote what they did.

We need to slow down. I need to slow down. As "community" moves on-line, coffee houses are replaced by chat rooms, churches are replaced by video streams and message boards, I'm afraid we'll miss something - miss each other - in translation.

Can anything ever really replace me looking into your eyes, watching your lips and your hands, speaking words brimming with inflection caught by your amazingly sensitive ears? Can anything?

Until something does, I'm being more careful. And I'm listening to friends when they say I "came across" as something I'm not. And I'm slowing down.

I'm thinking.

Writing.

Reading.

Revising.

Reading and revising some more.

And more and more I'm deciding to turn the computer off and just talk to people the old fashioned way. With more than words.