I save my blog articles off onto my hard drive, and remembering the three most important tasks in the information technology world, backup, backup, backup, my hard drive is also backed up. One would think I have important sh… stuff on my computer to worry about.
For some wild reason, I decided the chore I needed to undertake was to PRINT off every single one of my blog articles. Since I have a laser printer these printed pages might take more than a season or two to fade away. This was a project that took some time, went through four reams of three-hole paper, and a couple laser cartridges. The articles filled up five two inch binders as over the 14 or so years I have had this silly blog that fulfills some compulsive need – one day I will figure out what that compulsion is – I have posted close to two thousand articles. There is an old bromide about if you sit enough monkeys in front of typewriters long enough eventually something intelligible will appear… a monkey with a typewriter or in today’s parlance, a keyboard.
Did I hear, “get a life,” from the cheap seats, a serious philosophical question that I will table for another day.
Of course, the question in your mind as well as in my mind is “why”.
I wish I knew.
Depending on our order of ascension onto the Futurama spacecraft bound for the planet of Eternal Bliss, I can already hear one of my scion, or perhaps Señora’s, as they wade through the paraphernalia that I failed to take with me, upon discovering my array of two inch binders saying, “here is some more for the dumpster”. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, such is the ephemeral nature of this ostensible existence.
I could have printed it out to a much smaller number of binders, but I would have had to do a fair amount of work within PDF to do so. I just opted to print fast, if not efficiently of resources. I had other important affairs to attend to, such as chasing dimpled balls, stalking lunker bass and keeping Señora happy.
While 2000 sounds like a large number of articles, the reality is that if I had had a social media account I would have posted a large number of these articles onto there for their 15 seconds of fame. More than a few are links to videos or articles on other websites. While I find my “feature” articles such as Word of the Day, Quote of the Day, etc quite entertaining, they are not the stuff of legend. I have no idea of the percentage of articles that fall into this category, but I would hazard to postulate well over half.
That leaves a number of articles that have flowed directly from my cerebrum, through my fingers, been transformed into bits by my computer, and finally displayed digitally upon various forms of screens or even occasionally printed. If I were being honest with myself, most of these articles are of no great shakes. However, if I work really hard, I can push the self-critical, self-deprecating me to the background for a few seconds. This allows me to timidly state that over the decade and a half of the existence of Curmudgeon-Alley. com, I have written a small number of blog postings and stories that are good. Again,still in background mode, I have written an even much smaller number that are very good. Even in this esoteric state of being, I cannot push myself to go past B+.
Many of the autobiographical articles are important to me, so I have struck a note with at least one reader, me… as I tend to reread these from time to time. It is always interesting to rediscover an article that I had forgotten that I had written. Sometimes I am pleasantly surprised by how good a job I did. Of course, sometimes I cringe. In many ways, I see my blog as an exercise in improvisation, sometimes the results are melodious, sometimes they are a cacophonous misadventure. It does keep me out of the bars… as the old, trite saying goes.
The next task I am going to assign to myself is to go through these five two inch binders and sort out “the best of”, those articles that might have some vague merit or interest to others than inhabitants of the planet of Eternal Bliss. Hubris, absolutely, but hey I am retired. It is no worse a pastime than pretending I am a photographer.
And so it goes.
It’s good to look back over your writing life. I, too, find stories I don’t recall writing.