Monday, November 20, 2006

A Blogger Turns Four 

Happy blogday to me, though the language doesn't spill from me like it used to.

Happy blogday, though the world is quieter now, more full of white noise, less bloggable.

Happy blogday, though we've come a hundred miles or more, lost a generation and a job, had a second child, been homeless and come home again.

Some things haven't changed, I suppose. The beard grew back, though the hair doesn't hang like it once did. My back still hurts; the cigarettes still run my life despite a three month hiatus. My wife still loves me, and I love her.

But the evidence is in the archives. That tiny fistwaver has passed through tyrant into something bright and too-often self-aware. The students I once knew as friends are now just kids, no matter how smart, how coiled, how epiphanic.

The memory of weekly radio broadcast fades into mundania. Memes disappear; the last unhashed past congeals and grows cold on the kitchen counter like the picked-over bones of leftover chicken.

The mind I threw freely into the void smothers under the weight of family secrets, workplace preservation, all the myriad symptoms of a life lived in public as the rest of the world has come online.

I lived at work once; now I clear my head twenty minutes at a time, back and forth ten times a week between two disparate selves.

My voice, my world, my family, my home: some days is seems like nothing is the same.

Four years ago tonight, in the wee hours where I no longer dwell, I started a blog. You were there, too.

It seems like a lifetime. In many ways, I suppose, it has been.

It is still impossible to say just what I mean.

But maybe it's enough to have tried.

posted by boyhowdy | 10:15 PM |

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Comments:

Happy blogversary.

# posted by  Jack Steiner : 3:22 AM, November 21, 2006

 

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