I’ve recently started a project that requires a certain amount of reclamation work. By that I mean my memory is pretty awful so I’m doing some work to reclaim my memory by going through my various blog archives. It’s been something of a revelation.
I have three blogs: this one, another devoted to movies and a personal blog that is currently on an extended hiatus as I decide what to do with it. Writelife (ostensibly about writing, social media and so on) and the movie blog both have a specific focus (and sometimes not so specific). To some degree, they are self-censored in that career-related people, companies and whoever else can see them and I don’t want to come across as too much of a raving blog lunatic. (I’m not always successful in that regard.)
The third, the personal one, is pretty much me uncensored. In fact, it’s on hiatus right now as I consider the wisdom of this, consider the wisdom of trying to manage three blogs and I try to figure out what to do with the blog name, which is a stupid one I dreamed up at the spur of the moment a few years ago. But all that’s an aside …
Here’s the thing: Of the three, the most interesting is hands-down the personal one. It is the one where, when I’m on my game, I have the best writing. It’s easily the funniest. And when I use the word “censor” in connection with it I’m not suggesting there is anything that needs censoring. I use the f-word more frequently there, in the older posts, more so than I would now. But other than that, it’s largely tame stuff. The censor business was simply considering how I appeared to others online, at least in the first impressions sense. From a career perspective, was it a good idea?
Going through the archives (and those of the other blogs) I see certain themes recurring. (That is my diplomatic way of saying I’m repetitive.) And I see that there is one thing in particular I’m interested in above anything else: people.
Why is the personal one more interesting than the other two? Because it is specifically about people: me as a people (obviously) and others as people. That’s also why it’s funny, at least to me.
The other two blogs come at the subject of people sideways. Here, on this blog, by discussing marketing, social media, marketing, communication and so on. On the other blog, via movies which, when they are good movies, are always good because they are good stories and good stories are always about people.
I found it interesting that among the posts in the personal blog archive there were a few that sounded very similar to recent ones posted here. The critiques of social media today are very similar to the critiques of blogs from several years ago, prior to the proliferation of social media tools and when personal blogs were either at their height or beginning to fall from that height.
What is most interesting to me, however, is the writing (to me) is so much better. I don’t think it relates to the writing as writing but to what the writing was about and how it went about it. Posts about events and topics that, on the surface, were utterly trivial, were actually the most engaging.
So once again, as often happens for me, I’m rethinking what I rethought a while ago.
As for the project I referred to above, my fingers are crossed that I have the tenacity to complete it. That is always the hardest part.











At this moment, the world is obsessed with the perceived financial calamity that keeps sending everything down, down, down … except, perhaps, consumer prices. There’s hand wringing, hair rending, tears a plenty and profanities shouted from rooftops. As a Simple Plan song (called Untitled) says, “How could this happen to me?”



