With a typical weakness for the grandiose my first impulse is to try and sum up everything this is supposed to be about in one post. Having already attempted to make essentially the same summary in several letters and a lengthy forum post I know that any such effort is going to wind up being far too long to make a good blog post and far too short to cover everything I have in mind. Worse yet I would be so concerned with its perfection that I would put off the writing of it indefinitely. Instead I will make a beginning and from there fill in all the bits and pieces as I go.
I have made numerous attempts to establish a place for self-expression online. I maintained a blog at LiveJournal for several years, I participated in various social networking sites as they waxed and waned and I developed a personal website that went through at least three major revisions over the course of six years without ever being posted to a server. No matter how much content I added I couldn’t escape the sense that it was nothing more than a spare and wordy version of an old Geocities page; self-indulgent and of little use to anyone.
The fact that these words now appear on this site and not just scribbled in a notebook or half-finished in a random text file on my hard drive is due to my having found a purpose for them beyond trying to define myself. Now that I have an external goal to write about, it would be great if I could spare you that self-indulgence, but I am afraid there will still be a great deal to wade through around here. Unfortunately it is a fundamental part of how I think and therefore how I write. I hope to reign in that tendancy in my writing, but it will take practice and time. In the meantime, if you choose to accompany me (and I hope you will) then I must beg your indulgence.
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