Egg Nogger

put so eloquently:

"Do you have any idea what a gift it is that a young man offer to share his feelings with you? For any man to volunteer his essence to you, however carefully notated, is a miraculous act of generosity. The offering of his voice in a zine or a poem or a song is a brave act because he is giving it to you for keeps. With this gift you can read and listen to him any time you want, and you will absorb his horrible secrets hidden in the words, the shame he thought he might never shake, and he doesn’t mind, because he has offered these secrets to you, unafraid and as best he can. This gift can set him free, finally, fully, and put him on his way to living as a normal, untormented human being, unshackled at last from the chains of his hormonal years. Adolescent notation is of no use until the reader completes it by reading it and by keeping it, legitimizing the filth and insanity that he has worked so hard to contain and understand, canonizing it somewhere, memorializing it somehow. The mutation ends here. The young man’s notated life becomes absorbed into the world, unadorned now, an explosive apotheosis as his sorry former existence becomes gas and light and just another normal part of everything else in the world. Do you have any idea what a gift it is that a young man offer to share his feelings with you? Do you have any idea what a gift it is for him to know that you’ve listened?"