PREFACE: I wanna walk this a step to the rear and backstory why I went to all the trouble of this project. See, since its demise, the amazing Joz Wang took it upon herself to foot the bill in keeping the group blog Blogging.la alive as an archive. I think she had long-simmering planshopesdreams to reinvigorate it but hadn’t been able to because LIFE.
In those ensuing years, having never kept copies of my 12 years’ worth of posts as they occurred in real-time, I frequently fretted over the potential day when Joz might very well and rightfully pull the plug and all that work I put into it over all those years for the love of doing so might be lost forever.
There were several false starts back when life was quote/unquote normal, wherein any initial motivation to complete the ginormous task got crushed right out of the gate after copy/pasting a few posts. So in essence, Covid19 provided the perfect opportunity to allow me to see it through because, as stated to death below, I wasn’t doing much the fuck else. So in closing, I wanna give a huge shout-out thank you to Joz for keeping things going long enough for me to finally tackle such a task. Covid19 may have provided the environment to get it accomplished, but without Joz’s dedication to what Blogging.la was, the following never could’ve happened.
I have not done much this Covid19 “lockdown.” I have not learned a new language. I have not lost weight. I have not taken an online course. I have not Zoomed. I have not cleaned the windows. I have maintained weedwhacked. I have not played Animal Crossing. I have not gone to Costco. I have not mastered the piloting of a drone. I have not donated blood. I have not ridden my bike. I have not converted a single cassette tape of mine to digital. I have not volunteered. I haven’t even been able to make it through one fucking book.
I did get my ass in gear and plant a backyarden, but hell, I do that pretty much every spring so DOES NOT COUNT.
BUT. When years pass and if I’m lucky enough to still be in this world, I will look back over this strange timeless/formless suspended animation of life in all its iso/quarinsanity, and there is one thing for which I will be proud. For all that I didn’t accomplish, I did do something for which I am terribly pleased and impressed. In looking back over this void of two months I may have done not a lot, but with a little bit here and a little bit there I accomplished something rather monumental earlier yesterday afternoon that I loooooong dreamed of doing but honestly never thought I would.
Suffice it to say it was a daunting task. Not on a vaccine-development scale but daunting nonetheless.
I went on to the admin side of the long-dormant Blogging.la website, a group blog for which I wrote for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ,7, 8, 9, 10, 11, TWELVE years, and with the simple act of cutting and pasting each and every single one of my posts over that period from 2004-2016, I created a Word document archive some 948 pages in length of the 1,251 things I wrote about. All in it involved more than 328,000 words.
Whew!
Beyond having all that in my own possession, I’m not sure what I’ll do with it now. Maybe I’ll comb through it and find a Top-10. Maybe I’ll compile whatever might be its best parts into a “Blook,” to borrow the term Blogfather Tony Pierce coined. Maybe I’ll just sit back and be glad it’s a click away and pleased I made it so.
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