Once more unto the breach

We had a big thunderstorm a few weeks ago - tornado warning, hail, the works. I was sitting in a cinema at the time, watching The Dark Knight, totally oblivious to the fury outside until the power went out 15 minutes before the end of the film. But I digress.

Sara was sheltering in the basement with Evie and the dogs, waiting for the tornado threat to pass, when she realised that she'd left the window in my office open, and couldn't risk going up to close it. Once the storm was over, and I returned, I started drying and mopping. Amazingly, most of the stuff near the window was impervious to water (although I've not actually tried to use the computer's keyboard since emptying the water out of it).

Once of the things that wasn't impervious was a leather-bound journal I'd lusted after, and finally bought, about five years ago. Lovely paper, thick soft leather cover, leather cord fastner, the works. Beautiful. And I wrote in it once. I had the best of intentions. It would be a casual-but-thoughtful journal. A paper blog, filled with insight, and maybe a few sketches, line drawings, clippings, and so forth.

My problem was twofold. One was that the journal was, as I have said, beautiful. My handwriting, never the finest, has been reduced by years of typing to a rather cryptic scrawl. My sketches are best left unmemorialised. Writing in this piece of paper-and-hide craftsmanship was a desecration. I debated excising the only entry I made with a razorblade.

And then there was the question of content. I am vain. Much as many Americans support the abolition of estate taxes on the optimistic and largely unfounded assumption that they'll die rich, I can't help but believe that when I die my papers will be pored over by bands of scholars. So, anything I write in something so serious, so permanent, as a paper journal must be something of merit. We're talking about my legacy here. Crippled by expectation, I could write nothing, lest my legacy end up "Wrote about nothing of consequence, and couldn't spell".

So I've always gravitated toward electronic publishing. It gives me the illusion of impermanence, allowing me to delete and amend content at will, it's legible and spell-checked, and it satisfies my vanity in that (at least theoretically) those bands of scholars can start before I've had to do anything so mundane or inconvenient as die.

I wrote an online diary in 1997 (Wikipedia says the term "weblog" was coined on 17 December 1997). That got to be too much work, and I next dabbled in blogging in 2000, keeping it up for a whopping three months. Managed a bit better in 2003, as golb ran for seven months. And then... nothing.

Until now. I find I'm writing monologues on IRC, which is a sign that perhaps I'm using the wrong medium. I have conspicuously failed to set up blogging software on indecorous.com, so I'm going to see if something like Vox will lower the barrier and get me writing again.

Wish me luck. And do alert those scholars, won't you? They have work to do.