I’m continuing to assemble scraps of past weblog/journals into this one. I just retrieved all the entries to the Diaryland journal I called Still Breathing.
It was my first attempt at taking the experiment of Breathing Room from an entirely hand-coded flat-file system to an automated one. It was still in the diary/journal form that was more popular at the time. Generally one entry on the current page, ideally today’s entry. One entry per archive page as well. Even then, though, I found I was sneaking several entries into a single day, usually divided by an x.
It wasn’t till I got my LiveJournal that I really started blogging, in the sense of posting a separate entry for each thought, frequently several times a day. The ideal of posting every day was still there, but it became less important to me. Still important, but not the key.
With this, that really only leaves Breathing Room, which I’ll have to scrape and post manually into MT, I think.
There are some other stray weblog-like things. I’d like to migrate the old artsflow archives into the present artsflow blog.
I’ll probably leave the Daily Barbie crisis journal of late 1997 as is, although in a way it inspired the idea of Breathing Room. It was my first inkling of the power of daily posting to the Web, and it covered a specific beat, my legal problems with Mattel at the time. It was definitely a weblog by most modern standards, even without permanent links and a syndicated feed.
Naturally, I end up re-reading the old journal as I convert it over. Funny what’s changed and what hasn’t. There’s another New Orleans sequence in there, briefer than my most recent one, and without photos. There’s talk of a “neighbor cat” that turned out to be a stray that we eventually adopted, even then named Fraidy by us. (Oh now, I’m cat blogging!
I’m glad I made categories in this weblog for each of my old journals, because while I believe that there is a continuity in all of them, each definitely have their own flavor, and there’s a progression as I acclimate myself to this style.
I ran across one of my favorite paragraphs in Still Breathing on a page that will very rarely if ever be repeated in a “on this day in 2000” sidebar box, since it was posted February 29 that year:
[E]ach day you live out the entire story of your life. you are born in the morning and before you slam down that coffee you are still as innocent and vulnerable as a newborn. forcing yourself into adolescence before your time, you head out into the world, probably driving too fast, to meet your destiny, your job. at the end of the day you are more tired and weary than you expect. your faculties fade with that second glass of wine. you’ve eaten too much. before long you are missing part of the conversation and finally you give in to blessed sleep.
I love that fractal idea of a microcosmic life each day, an entire creation every time [insert appropriate Hindu god here] blinks his eyes. I had a vision like that once at a Meters show, but that’s another story.
For anyone interested in reliving part of that year with me, the new entries start with Don’t Interrupt Me! (currently the earliest entry in X-POLLEN) through mang! in May, with the entries overlapping some of the earliest entries from the Shallows journal written with Blogger.
At one point, Still Breathing was going to contain longer writings and Shallows (or Shallow Breathing) would have briefer more constant blursts for me personal home page. But I never stopped tinkering with that home page and now everything’s a blog, so go figure.