Simplification
Maybe, in the waning days leading towards yet another reminder of my own steady fight against mortality I’m just getting old and losing my patience for this type of thing, but I find my effort here to be one of mixed satisfaction. So much so has this been the case, that I’ve found myself writing less and less, posting fewer images, documenting with a sporadic inclination approaching infrequency, and shrugging off the gaps in between.
I’ve been writing this blog for sixteen and a half years, and in that time it has changed over and over and over again, nudged, skewed, adjusted, retweaked, but only rarely has it changed significantly.
This might be one of those times.
Yet, it’s taken me a lot of will and power and cringing, nose-holding-effort to lean towards a new kind of simplicity herein.
Partially, it’s an abstraction of a larger glut of overloaded senses, the often less-than-nuanced effort of a billion attention-seeking residents of this here internet to distract all of us from (at best) something more productive or (at worst) something real. I feel it. I hate it. I claw it from my mind, and feel in clenching around my heart.
In an effort to recapture whatever it was that has been lost… drained… sapped… vampirically extracted from my soul in whatever span of time it has been since sanity last wandered these electric corridors, I held my nose, mashed will and power, cringed fully aware, and decided to push this site, whatever it is, whatever is means to no-one-really but me, into this odd current era of digital rebellion.
If the internet were a person, it would be a rebellious teenager. Not so cute anymore, is she? Hardly our innocent little angel. Angry. Full of angst and misdirected rage. An agent whose actions have real and measurable consequences. All too dangerous. All too flailing against rational control.
When I started this site it was little more than an innocent channel of communication, a journal from a distant me living in a strange town to a far-away you back closer to home. Words. A diary. A tale of a young guy lost in a big city.
That effort sputtered with a real-life move, sputtered into an era of complex moral exploration and philosophical wanders through an age of confusing change, a space for musing on vague ideas in a safe space. For a while I wrote just to see the words on the page and because when I should have likely walked away, instead I clung on and wrote, and wrote, and wrote some more.
Then, with a newfound clarity and locked in the carefree innocence of a now-lost age, I mutated my writing into a kind of personal online magazine, a showcase of my creative work and a portal through which my hobbies would find anonymous validation. Pictures. Sounds. Revelations of hope and idealism. Data mashed against the perpetual deluge of pure experience.
Now? I’ve been struggling to find the same joy in the never-sought faux fame of perpetual posting. Now I think it is a kind of fourth iteration yearning to clamber from the pause in my interest and effort of late. I’m not perfectly clear on what that will be, where it will lead, but the direction is one of something less trivial, more focused, yet built upon a reduction of everything that came before. Less about what. More about why. A seeking of something more substantial in a form that might be more raw, less frill, and rooted in whatever bits of honesty I can muster.
Stay tuned for a simplification.
