I guess that title is a misnomer. A blog that no one else reads isn't a blog; it's a diary. So old diaries would be a better name, but they were made on software called "blogger," and it's such a ridiculous word that it's hard not to use it under any pretext, no matter how flimsy.
I wrote blogs on blogger before, back in olden times when I was in a period of transition and self-discovery. (Spoiler alert: all of life is a period of transition and self-discovery.) I was pretty regular about it, several entries a week. Not every day -- I'm trying to stay every day with this blog, at least for a start, because I read somewhere that if you do something twenty-one days in a row, it'll become a habit, and I'd like to get back in the habit with this one.
Finding those old diaries, though, have really encouraged me, because they've attenuated my expectations a bit. I was younger and probably more immature then -- I didn't use phrases like "attenuated my expectations," in any event -- but there was real value in that writing, sometimes even something that looked like wisdom. And there was garbage, too, lots of absolute junk.
And the junk is inspiring, too! A lot of days, I entered lyrics from whatever song was going through my head, whatever my favorite song was that day, recorded for all of history. Why would I do that? Did I think I was the only chance U2 had for the lyrics of their "New York" song to be preserved for posterity? Some of the old poetry I posted was absolutely unreadable -- and that's valuable, too, because it tells me who I was.
You don't remember "New York," do you? No reason why you should. It wasn't a great song; it didn't get a lot of airplay, and it only had one or two clever turns of phrase to prevent it from being utterly garbage. "In New York freedom feels like/too many choices..." is a great line, though, because isn't that what writing is all about? Probably there are 800,000 words in the English language; you can start the next sentence with most of them. Even if you can only start it with a tenth of them, isn't that an intimidating choice? If you want the sentence to be really good, to be epic, it has to start with the right one, not any of the other half million....
but then you hear "New York," and you remember All That You Can't Leave Behind was a pretty good album. But it wasn't a greatest hits album; every second on the album wasn't the best day they ever had. Some of them were great days; some of them were okay days, and they all added up to a pretty good album. A blog can be like that, too.
Maybe I'll have some really good hits here. Maybe I'll have some okay days, too. The only really unforgivable sin will be if I stop having days altogether -- if I give up and walk away from it without trying anymore. Life's like that, too... the important thing is that you keep on living it.
