I started this blog in 2001. It began on Google’s platform, a self-conscious diary that began with a post remembering an former colleague, the late Susie Forrest, who shared a desk with me at the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune in the early 1980s, and went on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 before dying far too young a few months after 9/11. I was working in a suburb of Zurich then, sitting in an office in Oberengstringen on a Saturday afternoon feeling the the urge to write some words, any words.
A couple thousand posts later — some best forgotten, some fondly recalled — I have never looked back at my archives to retrace the past. Sure, a blog post here and there when I’m trying to remember some incident or person forgotten along the way, but for the most part I’ve avoided re-reading and wincing over purple prose, typographical errors, or simple stupidity.
There have been prolific years when I posted nearly every day, and barren ones when I never posted, or rarely at all. The early years on WordPress were self-hosted, a nerve-wracking slog of manually updating, backing up, and weeding through waves of spam comments. I’ve been hacked. I’ve crashed. And eventually I migrated the whole affair over to Automattic, the corporate parent of WordPress and never looked back, grateful to them for managing the back end while I focus on the words and pictures.
Dries Buytaert, the inventor of the Drupal content management system, wrote a poignant explanation for why he continues to blog after twenty years. In his post, “A blog is a biography” he captures the reason I keep writing and hitting the publish button:
I never knew my great grandparents. They left no diary, no letters, only a handful of photographs. Sometimes I look at those photos and wonder what they cared about. What were their days like? What made them laugh? What problems were they working through?
Then I realize it could be different for my descendants. A long-running blog like mine is effectively an autobiography.
I’ve been working on a book about events that took place in 1858, one hundred years before I was born. The source material is a scant collection of memoirs, letters, ship’s logbooks, and newspaper clippings. The two men at the heart of the story left behind no more than a dozen photographs. From a few shreds of the past I’ve tried pieced together the story of their lives, but constantly have marvelled at how meager a record they left behind, and wrestled with how to honestly fill in the gaps without turning their stories into fiction.
I’m working on a story now about a Cape Cod whaling captain named Ebenezer Franklin Nye. Last summer I visited a graveyard in the village of Cataumet to look at the graves of two other sailors who died in a shipwreck. Near their stones stood Nye’s marker, a cenotaph to the man “who lost his life in the Arctic, winter of 1879-80. Aged 57 Years.“
Nye never wr0te his autobiography, memoirs, or reminiscences. As I dug into the story of his life I failed to find a single sentence written by him. He was quoted by others, his name appears in some newspapers, and his remarkable career is noted in a Nye family history, but so far I’ve been unable to find any photograph of the man nor any words written by his own hand. His life is forgotten, yet based on what little has been recorded, it was remarkable, a colorful career of shipwreck, survival, capture, escape and heroism.
In the 1990s digital cameras started to appear. I recall a quote by some Silicon Valley CEO who said the biggest impact of the technology (other than putting Kodak out of business) would be a profound change in the perceived preciousness of a snapshot. The cost and expensive process of pre-digital photography meant every picture was carefully composed before the shutter was pressed. A roll of film was finite. At best there were three dozen opportunities per roll. With digital cameras the CEO predicted, “My kids will probably take hundreds of pictures of each other’s butts.” Within a few years photographs went from prized memories to disposable jpegs.
In 1860 the taking of a single photograph was a major occasion that involved visiting a studio, wearing a Civil War uniform, posed stiffly gainst some evocative backdrop, head clamped into a brace to hold the subject still until the image could be magically applied to the chemically treated glass plate. The result was framed under glass, hung on the wall, and cherished as that person’s one and only likeness.
Contrast that venerated scarcity with the abundance of a Flickr galley, or the verbal breadcrumbs of a blog, and one has to wonder if our descendants will know us that much better than we know our ancestors? Or even care to see a picture of pastrami and rye we ate at Katz’s deli?
This blog isn’t my diary, it isn’t my memoir nor my autobiography, it isn’t handmade with quill and ink on vellum by candlelight. It’s ephemeral, it’s transitory, it’s a bunch of bits tenuously living in some data center somewhere. At least Ebenezer Nye’s final fate is carved into stone — “lost his life in the Arctic” — while ours flits by in a cacophony of ephemeral tweets and tik-toks.
In my previous post I shared a YouTube video about another blog from my past: David Hill’s Design Matters. That was a very good blog, something I am very proud to be part of, but it’s gone now, a memory captured in snapshots only preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Did it deserve to be preserved and remembered like Ebenezer Nye?
On this snowy morning of the first day of the new year, I leave you with this lyric by the late, great Lowell George:
It’s so easy to slip
It’s so easy to fall
And let your memory drift
And do nothin’ at all
All the love that you missed
All the people that you can’t recall
Do they really exist at all?