Blogging like it's 2005

Here in the future, in the year 2019, blogs are pretty thoroughly passe. The good ones have either shuttered altogether or transformed into something else: something tidier and optimized for visibility and revenue. Personal blogs obviously still exist, but they've been subsumed by the same forces that have shunted large swaths of internet-browsing traffic to a handful of the usual-suspect platforms. 

I've been in a bit of a creative rut. I've been a bit dissatisfied with my writing practice and felt a bit unfulfilled by my work, most of which I've kept to myself. I sort of just muddled along in that general frame of mind for a while, holding onto my erratic practice of writing in a journal or reading a book or long-form magazine at night as my sole preventive tactic against becoming fully unmoored from any semblance of a personally satisfying creative practice. 

Blogs are so thoroughly passe that it didn't even occur to me until the other day that I could use this site — this site that literally is my first and last name dot com — as a creative outlet. I could just write things and post them here, and even share them with other people if I wanted to. In realizing this, I feel I fully and finally embraced the zeitgeist: I stumbled into a repetition of history in an utterly blinkered, unintentional way. I rediscovered a discarded form that's actually never gone away. And with that, there is freedom.

I can just write whatever I want. It can suck; it can be boring; it can be irrelevant or banal; my posts can be all text if I don't feel like finding a clever or pseudo-profound picture to include somewhere in the body of the piece; and it really doesn't matter. My livelihood doesn't depend on anything I put here. It can just be whatever it is. That feels oddly novel, and totally freeing.