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January 22, 2004

Book of Revelation

Last night was spent at Jacob’s side, as he went through an old crate. Sifting through a box of someone else’s old memories, words, postcards, letters, journals, old show fliers and other ephemerata, effluvia.

Things have changed so much for me in the past few years. I wonder how much of it is due to getting older and how much can be attributed to internet activity…

I used to write everyday, sometimes for hours. My idle moments were spent sipping a beer or coffee, poring over some notebook that went everywhere with me. Waiting for the bus, writing in the journal. In between classes, writing in the notebook. I struggled over the crafting of the solitary word, the purity of la palabra. I always bought the heavy-duty five subject notebooks for my classes, so I’d have an extra section at the back for drawing, writing, feeble poetry, whatever. A free space.

I also wrote zines, but that’s a whole different thing. Writing for an audience, and solitary writing are about as different as things can be. This whole blog thing, it’s an unwieldy middle ground between the two, and I still don’t feel like I’ve really got the hang of it.

My thoughts have been pretty ugly lately, and it doesn’t seem right to air those here. No one wants to read about the millionth Texan who can’t stand George Bush. Who could have the patience to read of the flounderings of yet another twenty-something with a shitty job? Why on earth should I record any of this? Certainly I, more than anyone, am weary of self-important bloggers explaining that they will be away, or why they have been away, but are back now.

And yet, here I am.

I wish my friends still wrote me letters, as well as email. Nothing thrills me more than a postcard from anywhere at all in the world. Holding an old letter or notebook in your hand brings such a horrible and welcome and overwhelming emotion, like nothing else. Words are powerful, but so is the medium. The thrill of my four year-old self receiving a letter, addressed to me, formed by hands far away, has not dwindled at all, no matter how old I get. When I moved out of my father’s house, I left a box full of notebooks from high school in the basement. I knew I didn’t want to tote them around with me, wasn’t up to that burden, but I also knew I needed to keep them in the world a little longer, as overwrought as they were.

It’s winter, and I feel so distant. I’m going to be thirty this year, and I wonder how it is that people who were such a huge part of my life have dissipated to this weak correspondence and once a year meeting, if that. At the same time, people who are so far away are still so close to my heart. I think of them so often, while people I see all the time hardly cross my mind until I run into them. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and all of that. And all of the Friendster testimonials in the world are not going to do a thing to assuage my sadness at the realization that so many people I love are so far and distant. And all of the newsy emails in the world cannot hold a candle to a friend stopping by to pass a Tuesday night on the porch for no reason at all other than neither of you have anything better to do.

Posted by pogo at January 22, 2004 7:35 PM