Even though I’ve locked my blog down so I could remove the bad code from more than 7,000 posts (and deleted around 170 of them because they were too screwed up to rebuild), spanning years 2004 to 2022, I’ve kept doing daily content. Like anyone can read it.
When I started keeping a LiveJournal, we (my writing partners, my friends, and I) had things to promote. Books to sell. But neither LJ nor the WP blog I migrated to had much to do with commerce. I didn’t want to be an influencer even before people started giving it that name. I wasn’t scrambling around the Internet trying to find cool blogs and persuade bloggers that I was cool, too, so they’d somehow let me into the secret cool blogging club.
I didn’t have a particular agenda. I could speak with passion one day about things that matter to me–equal rights and justice, for example–and the next day I’d be showing off my newest “tattered bride” design for Barbie dolls, and the day after that I’d be rattling off a story about my family or my teenage heartbreaks like you knew any of the people or incidents involved. (Okay, some of you did.) My musical tastes and reading tastes have always been all over the place. If I talked about books or music or art or architecture, fashion or cars or cities or flowers, if you clicked on links or got turned on to something new, or you thought, this idiot knows nothing, that was all good with me. I’m a Southerner. We keep talking when even the dogs have left the front porch.
Everything here is just me processing the world. How it shapes me. When it breaks me. Where am I going and how do I get there? Where was I, and what did I learn there? Where am I right this minute, when someone I love has died, when a new dog has come into my life, when someone has just betrayed my trust, when someone else has come out of nowhere to be kind?
This is my–virtual?–home. I always wanted people to know if they stepped through the door, I’d try never to make them feel awkward or weird. Mainly because I LIKE awkward and weird, if that’s who you are. I might not always “get” you, but there is SO MUCH I DON’T KNOW. Everything you are fills a space here that was formerly empty. It’s a big house.
I’m not sure I have a point with all that I’m saying here. It’s been a brutal three weeks of straining my eyes to clean house. Of being mad that the doors are locked and the windows are closed against whatever beautiful sounds I’m missing. Then again, I know what else I’m missing. I hear it in the halls of lawmakers. I hear it in the streets of protestors. I hear it in the shellshocked voices that say No, that can’t be true, no it was never that bad, no, the [fill in the blank with the current talking point demonized group or person] is making that up… The liar succeeds by convincing us everybody lies but the liar.
It’s probably better that I’m overwhelmed cleaning Virtual House right now.