Things from your life

Plastic, metal, and electricity in your head; mikes, DSPs, amps, receivers, radios, wires, desiccant, batteries, molds; hot dog, cupcake, cowboy, railroad, ice cream, airplane, outside; static, feedback, quiet.

I was young; I needed a job; I wanted the money.

So. I lashed together my first blog out of putty and wires in order to land a job, last century, as a prehensile undergrad doing Web site scripting for a university department. I got the gig and kept the site, neon green text on dark green background, pink accents. It ended after about six weeks, upon the event of my being bored. The job lasted a time longer, until an elbow fractured (old story: vestibular wonder kid walks onto an ice rink) and one-handed typing became the critical path to getting the young English major outta school.

Roll the year counter a decade: I co-founded a local news blog; started and stopped personal blogs a couple of times & to no effect; kept link blogs and made little tumblr things full of funny pictures; took years to find courage enough to spell it “blog” instead of “weblog” or “Web log”; wrote a bliki, a weblog-wiki creature combining the worst of both worlds (that was the most fun). Also. A livejournal. Blosxom and Greymatter and Movable Type and Textpattern. Blogs for my eyes only. A blog of everything I thought for a day.

They had in common: they were words, for me or for you, and now they’re mostly gone.

When all this started, it seemed worth doing, and having; a long moment when weblogs were for the ages, when you were writing things worthy of codes of ethics, of archiving, of import.

By now, a little learning has transpired. Facebook knows that everything has to happen all the time, or in the line of sight of every person. Twitter knows that some things are are worth writing, and sharing, yet not worth keeping. And those are the things from your life.