Why weblog? (anniversary post)

Starting on Live Journal

People often note their weblogging anniversaries. Tomorrow will be a long sweaty day (we need another air conditioner) in the used book mines so I'll mention mine a day early.

My Live Journal user page says:

Date created: 2000-08-31 17:48:00
Journal entries: 974
Comments: Posted: 2,934 - Received: 3,763

I'm a little startled that I haven't posted more on LJ. My weblog is much younger and I've long since into the thousands. But I post stuff on the weblog that doesn't fit my conception of my Live Journal.

And it is hard to accept the journal's date of birth as the beginning. I was adding to my website steadily in my early days. But it didn't have the convenience of MovableType or the community of Live Journal.

I've already written so often of the value and pleasure that my online journal has for me that I'm out of anything fresh or novel to say. Which won't stop me.

My undistinguished journal lapses

Originally the journal was shallow. I'd already told my story on my website. I think my early Live Journal entries often spoke merely of my weekly visits to the CD store. I was addictively buying jazz and pop vocals, jump blues, honky-tonk, black gospel and eventually electronica. (A habit that stopped the week I knew I wanted to live with Charles.)

My journal languished when Charles and I convinced Charles to move to Durham. A new beloved trumps journaling easily. A pity, there couldn't have been a better time to record.

Spring of 2001, the house, bought I started posting on LJ again with a photo of a new house. This time I made a point of looking at others journals. Some fine people were discovered. And to my surprise a small group of folks started reading my journal.

Eventually three folks from Yahoo would be persuaded to come to Live Journal (one took considerable inveigling).

My favorite writers, Mencken, Waugh, and a few others I've never been much for reading published journals. Their diaries were straightforward records of happenings, annoyances, delights.

Tendency to solipsism

Blessing or curse -?- I've always had a strong fascination with myself. Or, more properly, with why I think how I think. No metaphysics, a pyrrhonic epistemology, my interest in what we like to call truth is the discovery of how I arrived at an opinion: resolvable only by autobiography.

Sound grim? No, not hardly. It is a game; you never win or lose, but a game. You can play it anywhere, anytime.

Anyway, this is a digression I want to curb.

I started writing about myself, my past. I'm a quiet person, markedly about my private passion, the game. Not that I don't talk to my oldest friends, Gordon, Victor before he died. But my avoidance of dialogue, not that I regret it, everybody seems too serious about their take on life.

Monologue or dialogue?

Writing about myself clarified. Rather, writing about myself in public. I don't think a hidden written diary would've been equally tonic. It wasn't that readers were the key. How many of my entries have even the most interested have you skipped? Seeing the thoughts detached from me, existing apart in their own space caused as many second and third thoughts as a conversation with Victor would.

With my weblog I've circled about the same feelings and events repeatedly. Even the kindest friend wouldn't have had the patience to listen to me wrestle with them again and again. But the post button was always there.

Memories have been revived, much about myself clarified. Pretty good rewards for a hobby. Beats collecting Stephen King first editions or blue bottles.