I am sitting in a car, looking at my phone. The car is running, parked amidst piles of shoveled snow. It is cold outside.
I am marveling at the present for the moment, amazed by the fact that I fan sit here, typing on a screen smaller than my hand, knowing that I can press a few more buttons and my words will be viewable by anyone who cares to look.
I'm perfectly aware that this is relatively mundane; typing on a phone and posting it to the internet is already said and done. Shooting a video and directly posting it is a said and done deal too, and that's far more complex, technologically speaking. One could easily ask why one would bother with more than 160 characters, post Twitter.
I realize this, and yet as I'm testing the waters with the day old Google's Blogger app, I'm temporarily stunned by how much my life has been changed by technology, as technology has grown in my lifetime.
A scant decade ago, I could only dream of this possibility, although I could definitely imagine it coming. As I consider dreaming of the future then, I would have said all this would come to pass sooner, maybe 5 years ago, or 8. The wait has been frustrating but the arrival is still stunning.
I've been keeping journals in one form or another since I was 13. From spiral notebooks to Mead Composition, manual typewriters, Moleskines, I have jotted notes to an invisible audience, trying to capture my thoughts, imagination, moments in time.
The greatest lapses in my journalling began and increased as I became increasingly drawn into the digital world. Not for a lack of continuing to write, but rather a great frustration as thousands of my words disappeared into a grey digital limbo through one technological mishap or another. From carrying a Palm Pilot (or a myriad of other PDA's) to those prehistoric days of carrying a 3.5 floppy, I have managed to lose entire swaths of my life writing words that managed only to become the ghosts of zero's and one's. Ink and paper consistently beat out my frequently failed affairs with the state of the art.
Now, I have left a trail of digital detritus online over the years ...numerous attempts to document myself, which turned out less than satisfactory. As the tides of the internet have pulled this way and that, I've watched my journals turn into castles in the sand of abandoned beaches many, many times. Eventually all platforms begin to feel like writing messages in bottles. And sometimes the whole island gets auctioned off along with the sand, the bottles, and the messages. And still, the paper and ink survives, for a consistent audience of one.
This temporary quality of digital media hasn't lessened the appeal so much as made me figure if I waited long enough, at some point there would be a better mousetrap I could get caught up with.
Could this combination of the Google products I'm playing with pan out? I'm optimistic, but I've been burned alot. Not burnt enough to keep me from trying, but enough to keep from dipping more than my toes.
I have a tradition with my journals--the ink and paper ones, that is-- where I devote the first page talking about when the last journal ended, when the new one begins and what hopes I have for this latest installment.
I'm the case of this blog, I suppose I've skipped that essential tradition for the sake of testing the waters, but l suppose this comes close. Close enough that it belies my optimism for this potential outlet...
And what will end up here I wonder? Will I feel that same freedom to write more than miniature op-ed pieces, or reviews of my daily doings? To feel comfortable enough to write short stories? Poetry? Or will it all collapse into gray goo?
Only time will tell...
(((( [-_-] ))))
