the blog experience

I've been thinking about blogging. Not about blogging today, but just what it felt like to blog a bloggy blog post fifteen years ago. Until 2009, I had a blog on blogger.com (now owned by Google) and it was magical, just how easy it was to put words down in a post. Not quite a journal entry, and not quite journalism, but just this informal way to tell your story. Putting out these breadcrumbs for people to follow, to learn more about you, and whatever you were obsessed with that week. And then, the next week (or the next day, or the next month), you could continue along that trail with another post. You didn't have to think about any fancy website stuff or submitting your crazy consciousness for publication on some magazine's website. It felt so fresh and free.

Y'all know by now that I don't blog regularly anymore. I average about one post every two months, and typically I'm just using the post to point to some other video or project. I don't know when or why those chatty blog posts stopped for me. And in the meantime, blogging has become a less cool thing to do. Maybe because social media has filled that need. But I never got comfortable posting the same kind of content on social media. Social media feels so chaotic and noisy — and everybody's voices are all smashed together. The blog was my own stage to tell my own story in my own way. And then I could happily go visit your blog and listen to your unique voice on your unique stage.

I miss the blog experience.

The above screenshot shows the last remnant of my blog from the late 2000s. For some reason, in January of 2009, I deleted every blog post, but still kept the blog page intact…? (Also, metaphorical side note: I recently had to throw out the shirt I’m wearing in that picture because it had too many holes in it, even for my low standards…)