1.02.2014

the memory breeds in me strange loneliness

    Ten years ago, I sat down at my computer, after having thought about it for months, and started a blog. I knew no one would read it, that it was a waste of time and energy to even bother starting it, and that I would never stick with it anyway. It was just a lark.
     2300 posts in (yes, it's that nice, round number), I can still remember how it felt to write that first one. In a lot of ways, I'm still the same as I was back then--but in most other ways, the ones that really matter, I've changed. Fundamentally. I thought that the blog itself, could fix me. Well, I've redesigned the site a few (all right, a hundred or so) times, taught myself a lot of HTML and enough CSS to get by, suffered through the rise and demise of three or four comment services, and weathered more than a handful of 'discoveries' by people whose names I'd foolishly revealed in these posts. In other words: I've learned. And those things, in themselves, have not 'fixed me,' but the experience, and living through it, and the writing of it--getting it all down--has made it better. And sometimes better is as close to right as you can hope for.
     Thanks to the usual suspects, those who have been here all along and those who've found this place along the way. This isn't the place for regrets or recriminations, but it would be wrong not to mention that it's not the same, and the worse for it, without Robert, Popeye, and Johnnie.
     I drove past 619 Main Street a couple of weeks ago. The parking lot that replaced it is still there, but in my mind will always be a tumbling-down gray apartment house with a dryer on the front porch. Too many memories upstairs.

[the title quotation is by William Herbert Carruth, from 'Tescott' in Sunflowers: A Book of Kansas Poems (1914)]

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