One Large

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.