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Bloggy Blog #76

I started this blog a little over six years ago. It replaced one I think was called Blog of Advertising Fail. Before that there might have been another one I wrote from this platform, but I don't recall its name. Prior to Blogger I was on Livejournal, like all the other angsty twenty to thirtysomethings were. Needless to say the 2000's have been pretty unstable in my approach to posting public drivel.

As another birthday slowly creeps in, I don't even know what I'm doing anymore. I'm still writing, just not on here. Not as prolific as I would like, but that's beside the point. I've been researching other platforms to post from, but then I get to thinking why bother? I barely post on this one I have now. I recently deleted a Tinyletter account I created last March. I had to request and reset password and login information, just to get inside. It had one post, unfinished. And, of course, unsent due to having zero subscribers. I also took down a Wordpress site a couple years back. It featured some of my shitty poems. Or maybe they're good ones? The lit mags didn't seem to think so, and that's okay. Even my paper journal is going on four years without needing to be replaced. I hardly wrote in it the final months of 2018. 

I think about an old bookstore colleague back in upstate New York. He read poems at some open mics in Saratoga County. I never got the chance to see him live, however I did stumble across a website featuring some of his work. White and red type with black background, just how we all tried it back then, eyes be damned. The poems and prose were nice, words that resonated due to our working together. I wish we could have connected more with it, but by the time I came to discover his page, he had married and moved away. 

A college friend and successful man of letters and social movement recently checked in with me earlier this month. He inquired to my whereabouts and asked, interestingly, if I am still writing. I told him I was, albeit not as prolific as him and some of his peers. He told me to keep at it, which is as good advice as I could get this day and age. I mean really, what else is there to do? Keep your head above water. Something will break, one of these days, right? 

Part of the reason I hadn't been writing on here much is because I'm trying to focus on other projects. A sporadic focus, but still. More poems. More nonfiction. More essays. A play. A stronger portfolio for potential graduate school applications. It's all right there, and all I need to do is keep digging in. Keep at it. There's nothing wrong with placing your work up on the shelf for a bit, so long as you remember where that shelf is. 

I sometimes wonder if that bookstore colleague, after all these years, still writes. A while back a mutual friend mentioned he had twins with his wife. With a family now, I'm sure he still dabbles in letters. He's got plenty of material before him, sprawled and shouting about the house. Or maybe he stopped writing altogether. And you know what? That's okay too. 

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