seven year itch

"The only people who keep journals are virgins & sea captains."

This is the place where I say something meaningful about the fact that I have kept this diary for seven years.

Um. Yeah.

Like there's anything to say. The "blogging phenomenon" has changed the face of the web, and now everyone's doin' IT. Yeah, I've got a LiveJournal, if only to have a place where I can post quiz results and the brief silly thoughts that cross my mind on a daily basis. Yeah, I have a Blogger account, and it turns out that the premature death of my modem has forced me to continue one-click publishing long after I planned to go back to the hand-coded format.

I met one of my best friends because of this journal.

I've opened a window for all the recipients of my complicated grudges to peer inside at my insipidity.

I've been keeping a daily journal for 14 years; now half of that is available for public consumption. What's even weirder is that exactly one year after starting this public web journal thang, I went on my first real date with the Boy. Our entire relationship is encapsulated in this thing. (Well. Most of it.) And now our baby is sleeping the sleep of the just only a few feet away from my typing fingers. All in all, it's been an even longer, even stranger trip than Jerry Garcia could've described.

Virgins & sea captains, man. Virgins & sea captains.

I'm starting to feel like my time on this here WWW has passed. Oh, I don't mean that I'll stop writing. It's more like I feel that I'm turning into Dana Carvey's Cranky Old Man character.

"In my day, we didn't have LiveJournal or Diaryland or Blogger! We wrote our sites in Notepad and FTP'd them to Geocities for hours over a slow dial-up connection! And we didn't have digital cameras to instantly document an event! No! None of that crap! We took conventional pictures with a regular camera and we waited for the supermarket to develop them! Then we'd use the big ugly scanner at work when the boss wasn't looking! And we didn't have Friends pages where we could find all our buddies making a movie date or telling the world what kind of yoghurt they were!! No! We linked to the three other online journals of people we'd never met. When you said Kymm or Al everybody knew who you were talking about! You would cower in fear that the Gus would play a joke on you and make you look lame! Pamie was just a gleam in some comedian's eye, not a world-wide phenomenon!

"And we LIKED it! WE LOVED IT!! We made rings and suburbs and bragged that we'd never use an HTML editor if it meant our death! We called our sites journals, and we were damned snotty about writing quality. There was none of this "three lame updates about my pimples and a link to a Matrix parody" every day blog shit! We would've laughed that crap right out of Open Pages! There were no Diary Awards, just Archipelago, and only 20 people could get into it and that's the way we LIKED it!"

- a rant from last fall

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- Rocketbride's adventure of 6/14/2004 10:56:00 p.m.