The last post I wrote here was on May 18, 2017, and since then, the weblog has been frozen in time. Realizing this yesterday, as I was reviewing the website in preparation for an update, my first thought was, Okay great, that settles it. Time to get rid of the damn blog. Get rid of the guilt about not posting. The pressure to make small talk into the void. How liberating!
But then I looked at the weblog archives, and saw the long list of dates in the sidebar going back to March of 2003, and it hit me that I’ve been grappling with this weblog for almost twenty years now, and the fact of its longevity gave me pause.
When I started it, weblogs were a thing, and I felt I should have one because that’s what people were doing, but I was never very good at it. This was before social media really took off—before Facebook and Twitter and Instagram—and I remember being terribly confused as I tried to craft those first posts. I didn’t understand who I was supposed to be talking to. I didn’t know how to position myself within the discourse, and it felt weird just to launch words out into the ether. But I tried. Over the decades I tried, until one day, for no reason, I just stopped.
Now, reading through some of those old posts, I see a record of my struggles while on tour with my second novel, All Over Creation, a book whose launch got lost amidst the U.S. attack on Baghdad and the Iraq War. I hear my spluttering outrage over the debasement of language and the distortion of truth by former President Bush (March 19, 2003), an outrage which now, post-Trump, seems naive and almost laughable. I see pictures of my mom with her red umbrella (August, 17, 2003), when she was still alive, and with her radiation mask (November 7, 2003), when she was being treated for the cancer that killed her. I see pictures of me, kissing a walrus at the NY Aquarium (January 1, 2009), and of my bad cat Weens lying on the manuscript of A Tale for the Time Being (February 2, 2012), and the entry I wrote about shaving my head for ordination (June 28, 2010). And so much more…
It’s a wildly sporadic, semi-public but also weirdly intimate record of the past eighteen years of my life, random thoughts and events, the details of which I’ve largely forgotten. And even though it’s kind of embarrassing, I can’t bring myself to delete it, so, here it will stay, at least for the time being. I don’t know how much more I’ll be posting, but I’ll keep trying.
me, kissing Nuka, the walrus