I enjoy writing. The actual physical activity, the thought process, the progress, the final product, all are enjoyable tasks for me. I’ve seldom suffered from writer’s block, but mostly because I’ve usually been in a position to just write whatever was exciting me at the time. There are no demands on me to journal here, other than a small nagging feeling of obligation for regular posts.

This has sort of changed lately. There is a finite amount of time I can spend banging out words, and frankly, other projects have been consuming this time.

I made a mistake on this site early on. I decided to have set days for set posts. A repost day (to get content from previous attempts at online journaling into one place), a poetry day, Ugly Shirt Saturdays, a video day. And I still do most of these, but the video went by the wayside due to technical difficulties, time, and interest. It’s been a month since I’ve posted a shirt, and I kinda forgot about the reposting of older posts and poetry. I kept getting this feeling of missed deadlines, and like I was somehow failing to get my work in on time. Yes work. And when your hobbies start to feel like work, it’s time to get new hobbies.

So Sundays will no longer be a repost day, Mondays no longer a poetry day, and like I said, videos aren’t even on the menu right now. I still want to get back to the Ugly Shirt Saturdays, since my original goal was one a week for a year. I’m adjusting this to getting up 52 posts before I stop doing them on any kind of regular basis, but it wasn’t a lack of shirts forcing this issue, but again, time and interest. Getting the photos taken and edited always seemed like the bottleneck here. Ah hell, I have a hundred excuses, but none really matter.

It all comes down to excitement (like I mentioned above and yesterday). Right now I am excited about designing new sites, getting old ones updated, and I have a thousand other projects vying for the attention of my ADDled brain. Some have been bouncing around in my head for over two years, which is fine, since I like to think such things.

I’ve always seen it as a death knoll to any online journal I’ve ever read when the posts start to become sporadic and the few that appear are there to explain why there hasn’t been a post in a while. These posts usually contain a line promising to make it a higher priority, but these posts always sound a bit like someone bitching about work! I’m not going to do that here.

I’m not refocusing. In fact the opposite is true. I thrive and flourish on chaos, so not sure what I was thinking when I had decided a regimented schedule of posts would be a good thing for me. I will write here more often, will try to hit it most days again, but I’m not going to feel bad when I don’t, and I’m not going to worry about the content.

See you tomorrow. Maybe.

So I missed my first Ugly Shirt Saturday, or to put a more positive spin, I decided to take a week off from putting any images up. I’ve been occupied with other things. I have photos for the Things I Hate section, an Ugly shirt to post, many photos for the People I Know portion of my gallery, and a bunch of half finished posts, but honestly, I just haven’t had the drive to do any of this stuff lately. I bit off something new and it’s consuming my time.

I think I am nearly done with that for a while though. If someone had told me I’ve be writing nearly 70 letters in 11 days I would have called them crazy. My goal was 30 for the month or thereabouts. I figured an average of one a day. But I kept getting ideas of places to write and things to say. I’ve been hammering them out whenever I get a bit of downtime.

Finally I got some responses. Up to 5 so far. I get excited for the idea of going home to check the mail. I can’t wait for today to be over so I can see if anyone wrote me! I bout $41 in “forever” stamps and burned out all the spare ones I had in my desk. I have some more old ones to part with, but I want to get rid of all my stamps. For the most part I use online bill pay for everything these days, so don’t really need stamps.

I’ve decided that once this crop of letters are done I am calling it a day for a while, see what percentage of places or people respond. Might not be worth doing long run. 1/14 response rate isn’t very good, but to be fair, some of these letters have only been in the mail a couple of days.

Are you lost on this post? We’ll, I’ve been writing people and companies letters, some are dumb, some offensive, and some are just plain cathartic. And yes, I do realize that sometimes there is just no way I will get a response.

Every movement says,
I am leaving you.
With too thick lipstick smile
and casual flip of hair, she says,
Don’t look for me tomorrow. I won’t be there.
Her touch already gone.
She dances sad eulogy—that final parting—
drunken caresses forgotten, her touch breaking
     every promise of forever,
and she never waves hello.
Her laugh only memory.
The scent of her tears a cry from the past,
I am lost!
And there is nothing to be done.
No way to hold her, no way to keep her
     to yourself,
loving her lonely fantasy.
She’s meant to haunt many.
A shadow, a shape, an unseen form,
a ghost with pennies for eyelids!
In darkness a pleasure unknown or tasted,
     shed hair on your pillow your only proof.
And she’s gone.
And she’s gone.
As you knew she would be.
From the first touch, that dry kiss, her lopsided grin,
gone.

I love you always her way of saying,
goodbye.

christopher…. ‘06

Bare-breasted and snake bit,
she wants one in the hopper!
She’s a fucking loon
(some might say).
It takes a nutter to know a nutter,
and, baby, I’ve known nutters.

Ever wake up wondering how you got here?
What confluence of events or past life sins
made you and this day possible?
The Big Bang and primordial ooze
—or god’s benevolent guiding hand and Eden if you prefer—
all leading to that magical moment your parents shared
(the big bang and primordial spooge),
the conquering of overwhelming odds,
of that particular sperm winning the ovum race,
coming to rest against uterine wall,
making it past zygote to foetus,
all the way to potential human being?
Yeah, me neither.

But I do wonder about others.
I look around and pray,
“Please lord, don’t let them reproduce.”
Some of you are proof positive god does not answer prayers
(or at least has a wicked sense of humor).
On rarer occasion, I feel the need to pen a quick
“thank you,” hand it to the nearest babe, and say,
“Give this to your parents. It’s a congratulations for copulating.”
But I don’t.
Because I don’t like cards. And Hallmark doesn’t make one.

christopher…. ‘07

Seems like I often know what I am going to write about before I start hitting keys. I have many half finished little essays in the wings, and even one or two that are completely done. Then there is always poetry when I am at a complete loss (or is the beginning of a week). Hell, I can even repost something from one of my older blogs that I still find interesting. I seldom have writers’ block (unless I am writing fiction). But today I have no idea what to write about. Not idea whatsoever.

I’ve been trying to make daily posts, and for the most part have been doing fairly well. A missed day here or there, but few of those. I don’t think this is my record for consistently journalling, but it’s getting to be close. Maybe I have just run out of all the good ideas. See, that last line was sort of a joke, since with the exception of a few posts, I would say there is little here of interest to the general public, but then again, they’re not my audience. I am my own best audience. If I only worry about making myself laugh I can go to bed at night convinced I am clever.

Seriously, if others out there find amusement with what is written here, or find my pages through some google search on some random topic, great, otherwise I don’t really care. I don’t want to sit around writing in here full time, don’t expect the site to even cover its own expenses. This site isn’t about or for that. All I am trying to do is record some meanderings and maybe in a few years I can come back and be amazed that I once thought…well, I guess it will be a few years before I can finish that sentence.

Sometimes I don’t think people think these online journals through. With traditional journals (you know, the paper kind) a person can hope the journals will outlive them. Your grand kids’ kids will know what it was like to live during the 80s. “Dear Diary…” But with these database backed hosted sites, well, they take money to keep going. After you are dead your hosting company will stop being paid and eventually shut your site down. Then what? Nothing preserve for posterity, nothing to pass along to future generations. No one gives a rat’s ass about your myspage now and in 10 years no one will even know what a facebook was. Can you digg that? All these places you participate in online will most likely be either gone or in a form you cannot imagine in 10 years from now. As proof, I offer up 10 years ago. In 1998 if you were talking about a device like the iPhone, people would have called you crazy, and at best it they would have thought it would be the size of a small microwave and have a hard drive of 800 mbs. Go back to what people were writing back then. Try to find one prediction that comes close to online gaming, handheld video that imagines multiple movies on one device, or the speeds of computers or networking, or that kids would kill themselves over something someone wrote about them on their personal page.

You know, the idea that these journals are ephemeral is actually appealing to me. People can put forth opinions about the stupidest things, can place deep meaning in an online community, can consider the people they meet in these places to be greater friends than any ever made in real life, and it won’t matter to anyone other than a digital archeologist in 25 years.