Saturday, July 23, 2011
Living in the Past: Blogiversary Number 8
Last time, we looked back to my grandpappy’s blog, back from the day when they called them “periodicals” or suchlike. Today, we employ a somewhat more restrictive time frame. You’ve rid this ride afore, son. Strap in and shut up already.
Time is a cruel mistress. Not as cruel as a rabid badger or a cyborg with sawblades in its nether regions, but pretty damn cruel regardless. Also, lousy. Time is always too busy for a hookup, making lame excuses like “I’m a river” or “Extreme gravity slows me down.” Time never gets you a nifty little giftie, except for on your birthday when it always, inevitably, gets you one year older. It never just wants to hang out and enjoy some comfortable one-on-one action, but always winds up “flying” somewhere or slipping away like the sands in an hourglass. A bitchy, bitchy hourglass, and god help you if you don’t mention how hot it looks with its big voluptuous curves and tiny skinny waist. Plus, you break it you bought it, if ya know what I mean.
No, as a mistress, time basically sucks, in a “through the porthole and out into space” way. However, on the plus side, time is free, in a variety of useful ways. For example, no one has yet figured out how to charge you for yours. Sometimes you pay with it, but not for it. It’s quite a bargain, is time. Plus, it’s unfettered. (It’s also unfeathered, as distinct from hope, but that’s a little more complicated.) Time bides for no one, regardless how you may wish it to. Nail down a piece of time and all you get is a naked nail. Time moves on inexorably, foiling every effort ever made to freeze it, preserve it, pickle or kipper it, or otherwise hold it fast. Time’s ineffable freedom (I guess that would be “reedom") is what makes it so damn sexy. So it doesn’t matter that time is a cruel mistress - we all just keep dogging after it regardless. Which brings me to today. Almost. But first:
2002 was a carefree time, a feckless era, a year of who the hell am I kidding. Aught-deuce was a year so much like this one it’s hard to believe how long ago it actually was. Between troop deployments, natural disasters, political depredations and weak-ass sitcoms, the only meaningful difference between then and now is nine years of pure, unadulterated time. I’m not going to go all Rent here and count it up in seconds - that’s what abaci are for, and I’m more of a scrivener. So let me break it down like this instead:
In the course of the preceding nine circuits around my favorite flaming gasball, this blog has endured 2078 separately posted indignities from the fetid depths of my personal febrility, including the odd (!) optical goodie. Of these, fully 61 were committed within the past year. These are distinguished by a wide range of interestingness, amusingosity, and overall worthwhilitude. And as I gaze upon them as a captain might gaze upon the streaming deck of his foundered but recently salvaged garbage scow, I find myself entirely too close to it all, or all of it too close to me, to express anything like an objective opinion on whether I have squandered my year’s work, or, alternatively, whether I have expressed such profundities of genius and hilarity as might oblige me to have my computer bronzed in permanent commemoration. If the past is any indicator, the truth lies somewhere between the two. Hussy.
So let’s look backwards for once, or perhaps for seventh. For it’s been nine years of glorious onanism I’ve been flogging this blog, and seven or so times (since I spaced out and missed it in 2004) that I’ve taken the effort to review my own annual blather to separate wheat from chaff, gold from pyrite, and the furnishings of wisdom from literary whoopie cushions and dribble glasses. However, instead of looking at the output I’ve most lately put out, my practice (since 2005) has been to re-read posts 12 to 24 months stale. This was, of course, facilitated by my previously-admitted outspacing in ‘04. Which was intentional. You can’t prove that it wasn’t.
All this is to say that, each year on this blog’s anniversary - July 24, so it’s a Leo (cancer cusp) - I go back two years and read forward for one year’s worth of postings. In this case, that means I checked out 62 authentic examples of blogfodder posted between July 24 2009 and July 23 2010. I used to pick out my forty favorites but since now I barely publish that much crap in a whole year, last go-around I decided that a Top 10 was more numerically appropriate. And thusly have I done this year as well, with one exciting (to me) addition - a bonus, if you will, for a world too sadly lacking in bonii: Together with exemplars of my wordosity, I’m kicking in - for the same low, low price - my ten favorite photos from the same time frame. Which thus becomes a picture frame. O the blessed malleability of this medium!
So, in my own time-honored time-dishonoring tradition, I am cheating on my mistress by going back on her to re-experience moments survived and long since cast aside. Time, I spite you. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still have some fun further on down the road. Not today, though. Today, I hearken back to:
CHUCKLE’S TOP TEN POSTS, 7/24/2009-7/23/2010
The Hard Dunk
Storm Surges 2 - California Coast 1995
Storm Surges 5 - The Big Grey Toy
Big Jim, Taffy, the Wiz and Me
Echoes of Genius and the Bird on the Left-Hand Side
Hanging Around - a Ready-Made Collection
Song of the Enchondroma Plus Boot-Wearing Excuses
Impossible Answers - Chuq Settles the Universe’s Hash
Story Prompt 7 to an Expired Contest
Get Out of My Brain Dave Eggers Part Two - Generalities
That’s four memoirs, two short stories, two giggleposts, and two poems, more or less. A decent spread. Vegas will be satisfied. And then there’s:
CHUCKLE’S TOP TEN POSTED PHOTOS, FROM THE SAME MAGICAL TIME FRAME:
fogshroud
cellphone photo - sidewalk, 18th Avenue at Geary
nixon’s the 1/2
petaluma dodge
sutter buttes east panorama
two bush facelift
carrousel bridlejewel
alien swinger
lone shopper
sutro tower
sutro park sunset
That should hold you for a week or so. Out of curiosity, would you next prefer words or pictures? I’m pretty set up for either one…
