Day: October 13, 2007

One Large

Karl Elvis8 Comments

This is Moronosphere blog entry number 1000. And I look at that number with a mixture of confusion and pride.

In January of 2004, my friend Jennifer offered to host of a domain I owned. I wasn’t doing anything with it, but I figured, hell, I might as well host it someplace and use it for email and a couple of web pages. Jen’s then-boyfriend had a machine in his office, and was more than happy to donate a bit of space and a bit of bandwidth.

Do you want a blog, while I’m at it? Jen asked me, since she already had Movable Type installed.

I couldn’t really imagine why I’d want one, but I was curious about how the tools worked. I didn’t really get blogging, but I learn better with my hands involved than when it’s just my eyes. So I said, yeah why not.

I didn’t think much about it. I’d been hanging around with a few bloggers like Trance, Circe, Doxy, Jenifer, and a number of others, and I didn’t really see myself doing what they did. On the other hand, I’d been having a successful run writing erotic fiction, which was posted on a now-defunct site called Satin Slippers. So I figured, blogging might help my writing; it might give me a place to get down my own thoughts on writing, and would be a place to keep in practice when the muse wasn’t cooperating.

Plans like that rarely quite play out when it comes to blogs. One may begin writing about sex, to find one’s voice is more focused on personal growth. One may start writing about chickens, and then find one’s blogger’s voice has more to do with family and daily life. Blogging’s like that. Once you stop thinking about what you write, and begin to write, the blog has a personality all it’s own. This sort of writing has no rules.

I started doing this, one thosand entries ago, with no thought to who might ever read it, what it might bring or cost, or what it’s duration. I am, frankly, amazed to find I’m still doing it. I cannot stop, even if I want, though some days it seems a burden, or an herculean labor.

I find the outlet – and the audience – the be an essential part of my life, as much when I can’t do it as when I can.

Still – one thousand. I wish there was a good way to count the words; half a million? a million? More?

There’s a small temptation to summarize the fractional lifetime these 1000 pages represent; but I’ve done that in one sense far too much already. And the years between then and now haven’t lain easily on me, for all that there are high points ranking in the highest of my life. Summaries will be left for another time, some more concrete life milestone.

This project started out just for me, and always, I need to focus on that. It’s not for you people, for all I love the lot of you; it’s for me, and I have to keep writing for myself, and not censor so much as I sometimes have. Whatever I’m feeling, I need to try harder to write it, and let the desire to be good hinder me less. I need to think less about who may or may not think is that about me, and write, to the best of my ability, as if no one was reading.

One thousand entries. A line from a Gin Blossoms song comes to mind:

The lost horizons I could see
are now resigned to memories
I never thought I’d still be here today

I still can’t really say I get blogging, of course, but maybe in another thousand entries, I will.

vacation from *

Karl ElvisLeave a comment

Damn, I wish I could get a day where no one else wanted anything, needed anything, had to have something fixed, looked at, cleaned up, or taken care of. You know, there’s a down side to being problem solving guy; namely, when do I get the bandwidth to work on some of my own? I […]

Damn, I wish I could get a day where no one else wanted anything, needed anything, had to have something fixed, looked at, cleaned up, or taken care of.

You know, there’s a down side to being problem solving guy; namely, when do I get the bandwidth to work on some of my own?

I have a gift – it’s the thing that turn up on my work reviews, even when I’ve otherwise completely screwed the pooch, work wise; a knoack for debugging things, for seeing the root cause. Well, THERE’s your problem, and Jaime Hyneman might say. I’m just good at knowing, through some combination of intuition and observation, what makes a system work and thus what’s making it not work.

So I find myself forever in that role; the better I get, the more constant the need.

I don’t mind, you know? It’s not just what I do, it’s who I am. It’s what I enjoy. That lightbulb moment, when seemingly un-connected points of data suddenly assemble into a picture, and I can see the point of failure. It’s the tiny highlights in generally drab work days. And more, at home, in real life, when I say, this is the failure point and can apply, or help apply, some solution, it makes me happy.

There are points, though, load exceeds structural resistance and I want to simple give in, let the crushing weight win.

There are the points when I need time away from every single ounce of need, want, issue. No one saying help me or this is broken or can you fix.

This is, of course, the kind of blog entry I usually don’t post. I’ve written it a couple times a year since I started blogging, and rarely does it see the light. Because as much as I don’t want to help, I don’t want any help.

I need a vacation from the universe. And it makes me understand why people find the spike to appealing; let me go away from myself for a bit. Only then there’s another need to manage, and the cycle gets smaller and tighter.

The list of things I need to do gets longer only – never, ever shorter, and the list of what I want to do is almost forgotten under load. I was trying to recall the other day the last time I felt free enough of pressure to cut loose and create, and I cannot recall; it’s lost on the blur if the last year and a half. Even on my last vacation, never did I have a day where I could say, this is my time, forget what other people are doing or want to do.

I feel the edges of a crazy sort of rage at the edges of things. Sadness and anger are lurking at the back of my skull all the time now, and I need someplace to put them.

A good friend asked me the other day if I was ok – really, really ok. And I had to think back a long time to the last moment I felt really ok; moments of time, too soon gone.

I need to be back there, in those fleeting, warm, soft, truly happy moments. And I don’t know how to get back there.