This Used To Be About Me

I was a pretty young man when I started this blog business, back in its first iteration. I didn't feel young at the time,* but in July of 2004, I was barely 30 years old. Young relative to now, but I was kind of an old 30, with three kids already, living in already the second house I'd ever bought, with all the attendant settled-in nowhere-near-middle-aged hallmarks of middle-age-dom, like homeowner's insurance and crabgrass and school tuition to pay. That last part was just because we experimented with Catholic school for our kids at the outset, but it turns out that the early 2000s were not a great time to have three boy children in close proximity to Rome-affiliated clergy so we were able to set that burden aside by switching to public school until the first one actually reached college age in 2017.

Now of course I've got some distance and hindsight on that poor fucker a small-but-dedicated reading public was subjected to at the time. I honestly don't think about that old blog much, mostly because it was such a different enterprise. I'm not going to pretend it wasn't an equally narcissistic endeavor to this one (to the extent this is, which sounds equivocal, but let's be clear: there's no chance this isn't at minimum 50% self-regarding), but it did exist in a context, that magical word that makes professionally trained history types like myself get a little buzz on. The posts came thick and fast, for reasons that synergized in a moment that I accidentally typified and expressed, as all actors in all phases of human existence ever have, as both a creator and artifact.

I was a writer, but I'd always been a writer by avocation; I could only ever really get it out in response to a prompt. I lingered in a sort of twilight of self-inflicted apraxia, reflexively devaluing the impractical pursuit of ars artis gratia, as the lion once said. A college paper or essay test absolutely fizzed my brain to popping, blasting through the layers of procrastinary resistance to birth something I was always glad to have done and was usually confused about how it came to be. But without someone else's OK to start, the writing wouldn't really come.

The blog in the post-MySpace, pre-Facebook world was something I didn't look for and, as I think about it now, definitely rejected the first few times I sailed past those siren rocks while doing some janky internetting in the heyday of GeoCities lime green and line art. I started it with no confidence and the right amount of embarrassment, but nothing will encourage you faster than other people doing the same embarrassing thing at the same time. The next thing you know this very personal thing you thought you were doing is suddenly a moment. For better or worse, this is exactly how we ended up at the macarena.

What made me think of my old blog is that I've been getting auto-generated emails recently informing me that that some of my old blog posts (they're all still there, man, the internet never dies. Unless/until someone figures out how to make a dollar off its death) are going to be hidden behind an 18+ warning wall because of Content. This didn't bother me too much as I can tell you, I was a young person trying to find a voice, meaning I tried on a lot of things, not all of them wise or thought-through, so I could definitely see why some might fall into the "maybe think about this" category. I haven't done an active count to see how many times the word "dick" appeared in those blogs, but it was definitely more than seven.

Out of curiosity I clicked on the link to the page-to-be-covered-up in the warning email and... oof. As I said before, a moment that I accidentally typified and expressed, as all actors in all phases of human existence ever have, as both a creator and artifact. You can see the stumbling, the trying, the reaching. The telltale, awkward jaunt of each new hat I tried on, from serious pontificator to edgy satirist to raunch-launching shock merchant to pensive self-reflector. None of them really worked on their own and the result is some reflections of the time I'd rather not behold. I had a weird propensity to try to express my liberal inclusiveness by borrowing the language of the people I abhorred, in a technique I was sure would always read as skewering but already, nearly 20 years on in some cases, definitely just looks like someone who uses the R-word too readily (read: at all) or is still comfortable using homosexuality as a punchline.

Again, I was not a kid, so there's no excuse. I have the option of deleting any and/or all of it, but I don't think I'm going to, not unless I get the sense that it would cause harm to someone. The intended targets are clear enough (I think I was at least that much of a writer) but the message can get muddled in the of-its-time-ness of it and the clumsiness of the author. It all could have been handled better, but I think I was still also sometimes wearing Birkenstocks with socks in public at the time. I was not the best example of anything. But as an historian by training, it all gathers value as a reflection of its time the older it gets and the longer it exists. It's not valuable because I wrote it or because of what it says, but just because it survives.

As I said, I don't think of the old blog much, as it wasn't designed for pondering. It's reflective of what all blogs of the time (including this one, of this time) are: a factory not a warehouse really. Product churns out and the distribution is the end, a total diffusion; big bang and entropy in between the clickings of NEW POST and PUBLISH. I'm grateful to it, but it's not home anymore. It feels too small, the furniture is deeply out of fashion and it all smells vaguely of must and Axe Body Spray.** Best to leave it to the squatters and termites until one day it, like everything else, just kinda burns down. Hopefully for the insurance money.

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*In fairness to me, I had literally never been older.

**Feels necessary to say that I've never once used Axe Body Spray, it was just everywhere, so you couldn't help but acquire a contact stank.