It's been a long time. Well, not that long. A few years.
Blogger (or Blogspot) was something special to me. A scrapbook. A format where you weren't just throwing up a snippet, like you do in other places online, making glimpses. It was a sort of home, a real hub for writing and art and zines and magazine-y expression. A natural culmination of scrolling through Livejournal, visiting strange archives and forums, and encountering that uniquely self-indulgent form of lit we call the memoir.
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| Me, 1995. |
When I was little I destroyed our first home computer by deleting system32 to make room for pictures of angels. The crushing realisation of what I'd done gave me one of my biggest and earliest senses of shame, but looking back, it was very funny.
I notice time falling away with some frequency these days. There's a dread to it, not so much because the future is unknown and frightening and guaranteed to bring ageing, disease, and death, but because there are so many things that get lost along the way. Not just the things we always found important and meaningful, but all the meaningless and tiny things. The way anything is. It will all go away. And I'd actually like for that not to happen. I'd like to step into 2005 and be in that beautiful before. Before the iPhone changed our insular worlds. Before The Saturdays released 'Disco Love'. Before a thousand conventions were made. Before the 2008 financial crash that had every news programme showing footage of the same Northern Rock bank in Kingston. We still had CRT TVs and 4:3 format. I was a child, and I wanted to be a journalist, or a singer, or a games tester for Square Enix.
I wanted to be someone who mattered, or to see something that mattered. And then this place, and others like it, made me feel that everything mattered. The perfect little microcosm of writing, the girls pouring weird graphics and makeshift photocopied music magazines into their blogs. Tavi Gevinson slamming into every single artsy teen girl like a brick. Grimes wriggling around on stage like a curious, pretty beetle.
I haven't had a scanner for a few years, which I'm sure would alarm the me of ten years ago. Shifting to digital art was an experiment, at first, but then it just became where I lived. And I like it a lot, but it seems sad to have left the clunky, choppy collage look so far behind. That crunchy stuff felt like a distilled essence of who I was on the inside. However, now I have a sketchbook that I draw in in pencil. Something is lost, maybe, but something is gained too. I am different, and I'm not. And I wish it could be either one. Either a totally new, emergent creature, or else the same old reliable freak forever. The cruellest reality is in the mix of the two.
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| Me, 2020. |
Yet, this blog still exists. The past is real. And our memories are a constellation in blurred images. I think I should appreciate things more. I think the now that I have hold of is going to be something I'll miss, just like all those pasts that slide over each other in scales. Like plates of a hair shaft, flaking off and becoming the dust.
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| Me, this month. |
