Hanging it up, hanging it out there

I was shocked the oth­er day to check a friend’s blog, only to dis­cov­er that it had utter­ly van­ished. When I emailed him to ask what hap­pened, his reply gave me pause. “It was just point­less,” he wrote me. “I did­n’t real­ly have any­thing to say on it, so…” So he shut it down, and turned his focus to oth­er projects. Though sad­dened to lose this pre­cious con­tact with him in his north­ern iso­la­tion, I under­stand his rea­sons, and look for­ward to see­ing where his cre­ativ­i­ty will next emerge into pub­lic view. (Though I am still not able to bring myself delete from my side­bar the now-orphaned title of his late lament­ed blog; a dead link, lead­ing nowhere. Soon…)

I know from expe­ri­ence what it is to pull the plug on a much-read per­son­al out­let. The Float­ing Egg died a lone­ly death not for lack of read­ers but because this writer lacked the will to put forth, or to even put down, any com­plet­ed prose. Noth­ing was being writ­ten that I could pub­lish, so I sim­ply stopped publishing.

Until now. Blog­ging has allowed me to reawak­en as a writer, just as the paper Egg first built my writer­ly con­fi­dence nine years ago. As I have said before, I see this cur­rent medi­um as, if not a smooth con­tin­u­a­tion of the Egg, then cer­tain­ly heir to that project. Indeed, speak­ing broad­ly, it is an easy par­al­lel to make between the ‘zine explo­sion of a decade ago and the pro­lif­er­a­tion of per­son­al blog­ging today. Elec­tron­ic pub­lish­ing is cer­tain­ly eas­i­er and more cost-effec­tive than copy­ing, fold­ing, col­lat­ing and mail­ing a sub­stan­tial paper product.

Do I have any more to say now than I did when I quit? I believe so. I am cer­tain­ly ready to explore areas of my life expe­ri­ence that were far too fresh and raw for me to even begin to address five years ago. Of course, I have lit­tle to no time now to ded­i­cate to writ­ing, but I man­age occasionally. 

There is a lot of flux in the blo­gos­phere of late, at least in the rel­a­tive­ly tiny por­tion of it that I reg­u­lar­ly tour. The Lit6 cir­cle seems to be strug­gling to remain unbro­ken, and the blogs of its sev­er­al mem­bers are show­ing the strain in one way or anoth­er. The gift­ed young poet Side-Car is reel­ing from a very dif­fi­cult breakup with one of my friends from high school; his post of 14 Feb­ru­ary took my breath away with its raw elo­quence of pain. Anoth­er good friend, Halfway Between, is brave­ly enter­ing an exhil­a­rat­ing and ter­ri­fy­ing voca­tion­al cri­sis. Every­where I am used to look­ing, I find things not as they have been. 

In an artis­tic-expres­sive sense, I have not yet begun to fight. When I find the time and ener­gy, you will find here a writer with words to to be read. I am almost done wait­ing to begin. I am def­i­nite­ly los­ing my fear of reveal­ing the pas­sions that my soul can no longer eas­i­ly con­tain. It is hard to know when the next life-cri­sis will strike any of us. I want to be ready as a writer for mine, so I can write my way through it in full view.