Scribble, Scribble, Scribble

Four years = 48 months = 1461 days (including one leap day). An infinitesimally short time, geologically speaking; a yawning eon in subatomic terms, at least if I’m right in my assumptions about those abstractions. But I know I’m right when I say it’s a fair chunk of time, but not a tremendous one, for human beings.

Four years ago today I sat down at the same desk and the same iMac I still have – though these items and I were a few miles south of where they are now -- and converted a long letter I’d recently written about my second daughter’s birth into an entry on Blogspot. I’d been vaguely aware of that blogging thing for a while before that, but vaguely associated it with semiliterate teen writing. Sometime that January, just as Ann was poised to emerge, I read something somewhere about more sophisticated uses of the medium. (“Something somewhere” is where a lot of people get their information, and I’m no exception.)

So I decided to give it a go myself. It was then, and it now, an extension of the diary- and letter- and other-writing I’d been doing for years. And I mean years. In the summer of 1969, when I was 8, I spent a week or so with my aunt and uncle in Oklahoma. One of the things they had me do was write a postcard to my mother and brothers back home. They didn’t explain to me, probably because they didn’t think of it, that you’re supposed to leave half of the postcard blank for the address. I proceeded to fill up the entire card.

Not that I was an obsessive writer as a kid. I didn’t have many people to correspond with until I left for college, and never had the stick-to-itiveness to keep a diary until after September 1, 1980. But I did have bursts of writing energy in the years before that, such as the time in the second grade that I wrote a book, of sorts, about the planets because I’d been given an assignment to do a report about the planet Jupiter. I copied most of my information from the Junior Encyclopaedia Britannica, late-50s edition (“only please to call it research”). Or the numerous comic strips I drew in which the point was to kill off all or most of the characters by the end. Or the pages and pages a thing called The Plane Racers, a stick-figure imitation of The Wacky Racers that, if I remember right, eventually became much more elaborate (in its way) than that cartoon.

In junior high, a fellow named Billy and I created a war game that must have occupied 30 or 40 pages of notebook paper, supposedly spanning a couple of solar systems, with intricate rules of engagement for an array of combatants. In high school, among other things, I invented a farcical pseudo-history of Dark Ages Europe that went on for about 30 double-spaced typewritten pages (and, true to the freelance writer’s impulse, recycled some of that material in college, in a student magazine). In college, I took diary-writing seriously, and wrote student-paper news stories, short stories and other oddities for publication.

So keeping a web log for four years is no big deal. It’s in character. I was going to launch a separate third volume today, but there’s no reason to be so particular. From now on, however, I’ll publish pictures sometimes (but not today). I haven’t had anything against posting images before now, it’s just that my equipment wasn’t really up to it until recently.