I've been blogging since fall of 2001.
In that time, I've reformatted my look and feel, changed platforms from Live Journal to Movable Type (then watched as Six Apart bought and merged the two), and experimented with tags, clusters, groups, lists, ratings and advertising. I've Bloggered and Xanga'd and even dipped my toe into Deadjournal. I also ended up with about seven different websites, because it seemed like all the services I needed or wanted [read: all the ways I wanted to be found] were not available in one place, and were not really compatible with each other (i.e., one site had groups and photos, but you couldn't substitute a different blog or synchronize multiple blogs, another site had great networking but poor editing, another had horrible layout and formatting options, but cool calendars, etc.). Two websites, four blogs, MP3 hosting, musicians classifieds listings, MySpace, Launchcast, Pandora. And more, even. As Bugs Bunny once quipped, "the mind boggleth."
One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things. - Henry Miller, US author (1891-1980)My house says to me, “do not leave me, for here dwells your past.” And the road says to me, “Come and follow me, for I am your future.” And I say to both my house and the road, “I have no past, nor have I a future. If I stay here, there is a going in my staying; and if I go there is a staying in my going. Only love and death change all things.” - Kahlil Gibran
So rather than slip even further from the ridiculous to the sublime, this year I've decided to undo some of this deliberate schizophrenia. Rather than try to do everything online, I've decided to simplify. Apply the principle of Occam's razor, so to speak, wherein the simplest approach is more than likely the correct one.
It seems too easy. But it also seems like a vacation I need to take; a landmark I need to visit.
Each time you draw a straight line in the sand --- or as Kabir says, “when you put one foot in front of the other” --- you have defined a course of action, a new direction that leads to an unknown realm, a future where there is no map. Krishnamurti said it was a pathless land, this place where truth waits, longing only to be discovered. The safety of a dwelling place, its warm familiarity, can lull to sleep but yet never fully anesthetize the wanderlust of the wild, searching soul, which beckons us to dare beyond the stoop and forge a fresh road into tomorrow. -- from On Journeys and Destinations, John Litzenberg (2003)
So here goes nothing. Again.
