Encore Post: New Year’s Eve, 2005

What’s the point of keeping a blog (“web log,” for you youngsters) if you don’t go back and look at it occasionally?

On the last day of 2005, after about 14 months of writing revision99, this is — in part — what was on my mind:

A lot of bloggers seem to think it’s a good idea to recap the past year, because it’s almost over and we’re starting a new one. This is helpful to me because I can barely remember what time I went to bed last night, much less what crime against reason was committed by what administration official in March (oh, yeah, it was the Terry Schiavo fiasco). Even so, I don’t pay much attention to these annual reviews. Life goes on, despite the numbers we put on the years. I haven’t figured out if it’s a circle or a straight line or maybe a downward spiral, but it does seem to be just one damned thing after another, and bundling the events of one arbitrary time period into a package to reflect on doesn’t make much sense to me.

Still, I just want to take a moment on New Year’s Eve to make a couple of observations:

• I am the only one (so far) among those I think of as my blogging buddies who is blogging today, the biggest party day of the year. So, no matter how I try to paint myself here, I guess I have no life.
• I am deeply grateful to those same blogging buddies for all you have written over the past year, the first full year of revision99, on your blogs and in my comments section. I feel like I have made friends here, and thanks in part to you Precious Few, I have learned something about my place in the world. It’s not as exalted as I’d hoped it would be, but knowing where you stand is important if you’re going to move on.
• Some bloggers that I read have disappeared, and I miss them. I find myself checking for new posts on defunct blogs, hoping they’d come back. Some just stopped writing, some made announcements and stopped writing, some took down their sites and some left the old sites intact, like ghost towns, full of the past, but no life. I wish the rest of you wouldn’t do this to me. Have you no concern for your readers with no life? … I know we all hoped we’d have readers when we started doing this, but how many of us anticipated that we’d be setting up expectations, and things we do (or stop doing) actually affect people we don’t even know? If I had a million readers I guess it would be easier to quit, but you Precious Few are really so few that I could totally afford to buy you all brunch if you came to my town on the same day. When the day comes that I have to say goodbye, I see now that it could be as tearful as any real life separation. And, sure, brunch will be on me.

That’s it. I know you’re all getting ready for tonight’s parties. Chances are you won’t see this until 2006, but just in case, when you’re all smooching and toasting each other at midnight, raise a glass for me. I’ll be sleeping in front of my television, and dreaming of you.

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I didn’t think that blogs would be the CB radio of the 21st century, a giant snowball of a fad that would vanish as quickly as it had arrived, leaving all of us a little embarrassed at what we had said and done. Obviously, the trend was already disappearing as I wrote this post five years ago, but at the time I was still astounded at the underground literacy I had found around the country, and didn’t believe the world would ever be the same. What happened?

Maybe we all decided we had said enough, or that enough had been said by us all. Maybe we felt pushed aside by the professional bloggers, the ones who blog for the New York Times, or for all-blog internet “newspapers” like the Huffington Post. I know I spend more time than I used to in arcane online forums dealing with audio recording and vintage electric guitars — maybe a lot of us are preoccupied in quilting forums and such. Maybe we’ve switched to Facebook (240 characters per post) or Twitter (140…?).

Whatever. I still dream of you.