A child opens her eyes and gazes into the darkness. All she can hear is the sound of her own breath. But her mind roves in the emptiness—mentally peering over the coverlet, under the bed, behind the dresser and into the closet. Is she really alone? In her mind, she moves to the windowsill, throws open the sash, and peers into the night. What’s out there—beyond the dark tree line, above the black lake, in the night sky, between the twinkling stars? The wonder and fear are tantalizing—she pushes herself to the edge, to the very limit of what she can stand to contemplate.
A longing for an escape from the familiar masquerading as fear of the unknown. A desire to preserve the past while making way for the future. A need to know and understand the world, both within and beyond our own minds. These are some of the reasons why we write.
I wasn’t ever going to start a blog. I didn’t have the time, I said. And there are so many other blogs out there—what value could one more add to an already vast sea of ideas and information? Then I began to reconsider the idea last fall, in light of a conversation I began online with a blogger and writer I deeply respected and was beginning to consider a friend. An adventurous writer with a deep curiosity about the strangest aspects of existence (frontier science, cryptozoology, UFOlogy, parapsychology, and whatever other weirdness happened to tickle his fancy) and with several published books already under his belt, he considered his blog to be the staging ground for his ideas. It was an intriguing notion—using a blog as a starting point for conversation with others, to engage in meaningful dialogue with readers and consider their thoughts and interests before sinking a lot of time into a new major writing project. Tempting, yes…but still not reason enough to embark upon yet another creative endeavor with an uncertain future.
But when he passed away unexpectedly last year, his blog—and the act of blogging itself—took on an entirely new meaning for me. His last post—a story about artificial intelligence—seemed an apt metaphor for a life cut brutishly short: a story that ended in an utterly random place in the narrative, without resolution or a storybook ending that ties everything neatly together and forces it all to somehow make sense. And now that blog, which may very well be the crowning achievement of his brief life, resembles the very nature of modern existence. Haphazardly arranged, without a central purpose to guide it in a specific direction, fundamentally unsatisfying, it is nevertheless a thing of strange beauty and an object of endless curiosity, dangling inconclusively in cyberspace for as long as the pixels shall endure.
To say that I started this blog as homage to that writer is perhaps an overstatement. After all, who am I to believe that I could fill such shoes? I’m a Minneapolis-based writer with few publishing credits to my name and nothing notable at that, a producer of a few experimental short plays, and a musician with a low profile even on the local scene. What could I possibly have to add to the vast and infinite discourse taking place in the cybersphere—especially with so many other writers out there who’ve actually made important contributions to our culture and our lives? Nevertheless, I was inspired by what that other writer did—he carved out a little space for his unique perspective in the universe of human thought, became a particularly distinctive voice in the transnational postindustrial chorus, as a way of marking down a record for the ages of what our culture looked, felt, and even sounded at this point in its history. (Apparently Morrissey provides the perfect soundtrack to our alienated, podlike existence of internet solitude.)
There is a chance that writing on the web may live forever, or at least as long as our limited minds imagine “forever” to be. The web may become the most archival record of human culture to date, despite its brief twenty-year lifespan—about as old as the Millenial generation—because the web is dispersed, decentralized, and modular…that is to say, while its individual components may fall into disrepair and decay, the web itself, and all the sentient thought recorded therein, will continue on unmarred as long as our species (and whatever sentient species replaces us) continues to use it.
So that’s why I’m here. And now, on with the show…
Photo Credit: Abby Ladybug