Ever since Hindenberg went down (up) in flames, I’ve neglected most if not all of my websites and journaling responsibilities. Well, if you can call bitching about pointless topics a responsibility.
Mainly this malaise is due to a lack of time and a lack of will power on my part. Going a month without a major update leads me to believe that I no longer “need” to write about my life like I did in the past. Writing now resides squarely in the “want” category.
When I was younger, back in the golden age of the internet, I felt a solid need to express myself in some digital fashion. In 1996, I began that expression. At the time I was using Blogger. Soon after Live Journal came on the scene, quickly followed with more robust packages like Moveable Type. Now it’s WordPress.
I think somewhere along the way, by being in art school, keeping journals, and learning to express myself in a more adult fashion, some of the newness wore off. Blogging for me is no longer the “cool nerdy thing” that I used to delight in doing. I think there are a lot of people that feel the same way. A lot of us started into this believing we were a small niche collective of like minded individuals, who, for the first time finally had a voice in the darkness of the internet.
Now, it’s all myspace and youtube and having a journal online is something that middle school kids do. “Personal” content went mainstream and destroyed itself in the process.
Now everyone has a journal. Not just a journal, but everyone has video from their phones on youtube, 150 friends on myspace, a flickr photostream from their adventures last weekend.
I don’t mean to sound like I’m railing on it, I’m not. I’m merely trying to illustrate that words on a page was OUR generation, and now that the next generation is here, social interaction is THEIR caveat.
I’m not trying to sound dramatic. I’m also not trying to cryptically say that I’m abandoning blogging. Far from it. What I’m trying to get across is that as I’ve gotten older, the teenage need to express myself and “find” myself is diminishing. Being, as of this winter, in my (*gasp*) late-twenties, I no longer have the same creative urges as say for example, the 17 year old me.
I’ll put it like this: Long ago I enjoyed learning how to dance. I enjoyed dancing with all my friends, learning new steps and trying new things. After a while I met the woman of my dreams who also enjoyed dancing. We danced together. One dance in particular. We got married, still dance, and still enjoy it. But, we don’t take lessons any more. We don’t dance with other people. We’ve found our dance partner for life, know all the steps, and now we dance just for personal enjoyment.
That’s what writing has become for me. It’s wonderment and freshness and awkwardness has worn off and it’s become something I do simply because I want to. I don’t need to dance. I don’t need to learn new steps. I can dance just for the fun of it.
So, in the end, what I hope will happen here is that I write about things I want to write about. There are many topics I’d like to discuss in great detail and will continue to do so until this serves no purpose to anyone or until it’s enjoyment is gone, whichever comes first. Neither are in the foreseeable future. You’ll continue to hear me bitching for quite some time.
In a post to follow this one shortly I’ll detail some of the actually events that have shaped the past month or two, but I felt it necessary to explain my absence a bit before I jumped back into it.
When the server crashed, it took with it a piece of my past that I used as a building block for my own personal development. Writing about what I felt really helped me in what every artist could describe as their search for the soul. However, while I was without it, I realized that it wasn’t something I necessarily “needed” any more. It wasn’t a crutch persay, something that I was relying on to get on with my life, but it was more of a security blanket or, in a more adult metaphor, a release valve for daily pressures. I could vent here on my journal and, with the exception of you guys, no one would really care. That was almost a relief in itself. I could tell the world what I thought of it and no one would really care. Heaven help me if I ever gain a decent readership.
So, in case you’re just joining us, I’m writing again, this time for fun. It may not be frequent, but hopefully it’ll be worth reading.
Out.
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