I was up at 3:30 am this morning. I was up at 1:30 am as well, but fell back asleep. I might have been up one other time between 1:30 and 3:30 – it’s hard to say. I tossed and turned a little at 3:30 and read on my phone in the dark for a while. I got out of bed before 4:00 or maybe a little after 4:00. It’s hard to say. The dog came over to say hello. His tail was wagging and his sniffer was sniffing. I gave him a few hearty scritches and he went back to sleep on his dog bed.
The reading wasn’t terribly good. I was reading the semi-private thoughts of a self-absorbed hack living in the middle of Pennsylvania who blogs about his personal struggles with love, compassion, kindness, his ex or exes, and the daily grind. As best as I can tell, he spends a lot of time at bars, and the rest of his time “lamenting” his many lamentations and why it’s not a kinder world. He seems desperate for a committed partnership or to get back to some fleeting sense of wonder that he once experienced. It’s not terribly interesting – though I’m sure to him it’s fascinating. Fascinating enough to spend his time re-reading it when he wakes up at some ungodly hour in the early morning.
It’s true. I spent the better part of my insomniac hours re-reading my own writing. According to the back-end side of this site, I have 1,185 blog posts, 888 published, 160 drafts, 137 private, 1 trash. I jokingly want to ask the software, are you sure they’re not all trash? A significant number of those blog posts are the daily fifty-two project. I started it in September of 2022 and am just shy of 300 posts in that project. My goal is to get to a year. Like so much of my life – with that project, I’m not sure what comes next. Another year? Different constraints? And what do I do with this past that I’ve accumulated?
Those are not the posts I was re-reading this morning. When I revisit old posts it’s either because I’m looking for something I’ve said before (and good lord do I repeat myself and my thinking), I’m revisiting a post listed on the “my back pages” feature of the blog, or (most likely) that web stats show a new page view on a post I don’t quite remember. At 3:30 in the morning I had nearly 30 page-views for the nascent day. Perhaps some bot in some distant time-zone. Midnight bots from the west coast? Early morning bots from Europe? Insomniac bots here on the eastern seaboard?
As I read, I began to think about the editing process, the curating process. More specifically, I couldn’t imagine combing through all of this crap trying to make sense of it. I have patience for people, but not so much for tasks. When I’ve tried to paint, which I haven’t done in a long time, I struggle because I don’t have the patience to work on the details. When I write poems, I often start an idea, jot down a few lines and then lose interest. I struggle to wrangle it in to shape. I was recently sharing with a friend a problem that I have with my iTunes library. It has duplicated most of my songs on my phone, and the library on my computer isn’t quite synced up with the one on my phone (there’s a 100+ song difference). I have over 4000 songs in my library and I’d love to sort this problem out, but I’m not sure how. He suggested I methodically go one by one and manually delete or add as appropriate. This idea just about made my skin crawl. This is a little bit of how I feel about the thought of cleaning up this blog space… and I think about doing that type of cleaning at 3:30 am when I’m reading and can’t sleep.
Sometimes, I think I’d like to create a greatest hits blog post. I joke about all of my writing being trash, but I don’t honestly believe that. A lot of it is useless, but there are some posts that I’ve read and thought – ya know, that’s not half bad. Which I quickly follow up with it’s not half good, but it’s not half bad. The thing is, in order to create a “greatest hits” list, I’d have to have a better sense of all of the blog posts (excluding the daily fifty-two project). And while I might be prone to re-reading a few posts here and there when I can’t sleep, I also get bored with myself and hearing my own voice. If I had more readers and more engagement with my readers, I could do a reader’s choice thing, but honestly that feels too much like fishing for validation.
Two of my more recent and long-winded posts have been wrestling with the idea of moving and starting new relationships and trying to anticipate these next phases of life. Pulling back a bit, I can see how that type of thinking is related to curating and cleaning up and revisiting the past. Looking forward often involves looking back to see where one has come from. I’ve been doing a lot of looking back lately – a mental inventory of what I might wish to carry with me and what I can throw away.
As I’ve revisited old posts and reconsidered why I do any of this, I’m starting to believe that I do it mostly for me. I do it to remind myself of what’s important, or what was important. The topics and stories that get repeated are attempts at learning, attempts at making small and big revisions to my thinking.
And maybe that’s the reboot that I’m really seeking? What if I just walked away from this? What if a new site appeared unannounced? A new portmanteau just as nonsensical TableDuck, ChickenTree, PillowPhone… A new bio and no history (at least no written record). What might that look like?
A door opens, I walk into a colorless, soundless room, an empty stage where the lights are too bright for me to see who’s in the audience. There’s no furniture or decorations. I say “hello, welcome to the mind’s recording studio.” I take a seat at the edge of the stage and begin to talk, a red light comes on “recording in progress.”