Tabula Rasa

There are few things in life that smart the ego and sentimental softspots more than losing 5 years' worth of writing in one fell swoop of a net-maniac's random cum-spurting. Indeed, that was what happened to www.dailybacktrack.com, and if you click on that link, you will see web ads for daily devotional bibles, back ointment and racing tracks. 

I know there are many people out there, very likely the same artless people who saw it fit to erase my presence from the internet, who think it no great loss that, overnight, a treasure trove of pointless, noisy, partisan, polemical, frankly very boring self-congratulatory hogwash was decimated, along with equally pointless posts with far too many eggs and too much ham. Maybe it's a good thing that it has all been washed away, like the internet was put on a brutal wash-and-spin cycle- I was probably getting too absorbed in a community of critics and cynics than fits my rather more amicable character. 

This is not without a lot of sadness, of course. As any person who invests a great amount of thought- lucid or not- in putting words on paper (or words on the net) should know, it is a terrible thing to lose it all, to never be able to look back at it with masturbatory pleasure, and to never again look at how one's writing, character, beliefs and, perhaps, identity had evolved over the years. It is like the death of a pet, for years I had taken it for granted that I could turn to my blog to write something pointless, or something terribly clever that I simply HAD to put down before I lost the thought, or simply angst as was the initial function of my blog- in the final weeks before this happened, I made a note to post some updates, to ruminate, to wax lyrical about stuff that was happening around me, to pay the damned bills, and I didn't have a last look before it was all gone.

This may all sound sooooo unnecessarily melodramatic, but I really did love my blog. I had entertained a thought that I would keep it going for at least another 5 years, that I would be able to look back in a decade and smile or wince or laugh or cringe at all the things I had written. Not everything was positive, a lot of it I regret writing and am ashamed of having posted (before it was shredded to bits in other blogs), but all of it was written by me, at different points in my past 5 years, no doubt, but there was a charming evolution about my blog that always made it fascinating to backtrack.  

With this new blog, I am going to tone things down a bit. I don't see any direction that it's going to take and chances are it will be very much like the last one- ridiculously, maybe even frustratingly *unfocused* (or eclectic!), but I do invite you, whoever is out there reading this, to play along with me and make happy potty time in my new sandpit. Yes, there will be no end to my awkward metaphors and my love of long sentences, because that's ME, dammit, and I hope that, if you were expecting this semi-tragedy to have thrown me off kilter into some emo pill popping net hobo, then you are going to be sorely disappointed, because I don't take well to destruction- I just rise above it and become sunshinier. Yes, that means more ham and eggs.