A Brand New Chapter

This is a little strange, as of the time of this writing, I have no idea what to do with this, or where I'm going to put it. It is 9 o'clock in the morning on the longest day of the year, I'm listening to Motorhead's album Ace of Spades, and apparently I'm on a new journey. For the past 5 years, since July of 2008, I have made an attempt to write at least once a week for public consumption. I used to write everyday for myself, but that has since taken a back seat. I'm sure we'll get to that at some point in the future. When I first started “blogging,” I didn't even really know what a Blog was. I had heard the term used, I had what I thought was a general idea of what it was, but I had never participated in either reading or writing one. At that time, having no computer of my own, I was only using a computer once a week, so I was not very tech-savvy. My Myspace page was actually set up for me by one of my band mates at the time. He wanted us to all be on Myspace, so he set it up. I didn't even know initially, I found out when people stared telling me to be careful what I post. At first I thought there may have been some sort of mass delusion going on, but it turns out that I was the delusional one. Thus my first “Blog” was a bit of a joke. I just did it to try it out, which is something I do often, as I'm sure we'll get to at some point in the future. After that first one, every week, when I went to use the computer, I would try to tell a little story about what was going on. That soon became my reason for going to use the computer.

Over the years, even though everyone else bailed to Facebook, I kept on posting to Myspace. I saw my readership go from an average of about 30 hits a week, down to zero. Over the past year, I think it got read a total of 6 times. I take responsibility, I did not go with the herd. I thought I wasn't really interested in people actually reading it. To me it was more about the thought that they could read it. Since people could read it, I was trying to make it the best I could, and thought of it as a practice of sorts. I came up with content every week, even if it was just the mundane details of my trivial life. All the while, I was proud that I was getting my words in, and feeling that at least it would always be there for posterity's sake. I've often heard that people have to be very careful about what they post on-line, because once it's on-line it's on there forever. Well I have recently learned that is not necessarily true. After five years of using Myspace to practice the craft of writing in a consumable format, they changed the game. They have decided that the Blog section of their site was no longer important, so they did away with it. Along with my, and everyone else's, content. I am fortunate enough to have had the foresight to print everything in hard copy as I went, I'm still not completely trusting of computers, so I have copies of everything I wrote. Not everyone was so lucky. I suppose they shouldn't have been so trusting, if it was important to them.

This brings us to the strangeness of today. For the past few months, I've started listening to albums that I've always wanted to listen to, but never got around to. I've been listening to the albums as I write. Well, this week I went to listen and write, and that's when I found out that Myspace had gotten rid of all my stuff. I searched frantically, for a good bit before I realized it was futile. So, as the week went by, I still wanted to listen to an album, and I still wanted to write, it's become habit, I suppose. Hence, I am here listening to Motorhead not sure if anything is even going to become of what it is that's being written. All I do know is that I still have the desire to write. I also know that after a long stretch of readership decline, I have the desire to be read. I suppose my only real choice at this point is to go onto a blogging site, and hope that readers find me. I'm still kind of against the idea of asking people to read it, so I can't see myself “marketing.” Like I said earlier, it's more the idea that they could read it if they wanted to. Whoever “they” are. It probably won't even happen today, since I'm running out of time. Imagine that, running out of time on the longest day of the year. But this seems like a totally appropriate day for this to happen, I always celebrate this day anyway, it's time for a change. I have what may be my band's only show of the whole year tomorrow. I practically have a whole new life, compared to just a few short months ago. What better time to start something new?

Daughn