Part 1: The Problem with a Hiatus
The problem with a hiatus, with pauses, when there is no imposed or defined limit (like there is, say, when you take a vacation from your day job) is that there’s really nothing to tell you it’s time to go back, to get back on the horse. Nothing but your own sense of the thing, and that can be a dicey proposition, as the long gap in this strange online thing I am creating demonstrates. And I know what happens, when that pause stretches out, because I’ve been on the other side of it, with other people’s online stuff, often enough. Anyone who bothered to read it regularly makes their regular visits, a few times, and then those visits stretch out, become less frequent, and finally it is given up as a lost cause. At best it becomes, perhaps, a link in some bookmark file, a reminder of something that held a small portion of attention once. Half a year along perhaps it is come upon again, browsing the attenuated extracurricular memory that the internet permits. Still nothing there: maybe the link gets deleted. I suspect that nobody who orphans a project of this nature for more than a month or two ever manages to get everybody back: attention is a fickle thing. So be it. I am determined to supply those who have provided patronage with everything that was set out in the terms I defined, and beyond that, this thing will serve whatever purpose it serves. It is entirely relevant to the subject at hand, that exactly what purpose that might be is something I became increasingly confused about over the course of the first half year of its existence.
So anyway, I don’t know exactly what’s going on with starting up again, because I’m right in the middle of it here and don’t have all that much idea about where it’s going. I can say with some precision, however, where this hiatus started: it started with the death of Tiny.
The day Tiny died I started to write something for this:
Tiny Bug Main, our sweetheart kitty, died today, Wednesday May Fourth, Two Thousand Five. After a long life and a slow and dignified decline we saw to it that he was able to have a peaceful death. My confidence that we did the right thing is matched by how sad writing that makes me. This is Tiny’s story.
We’re not sure how old Tiny is. Jennifer received him from a coworker at some long past job whose aunt (his former owner) had suffered a stroke and was going into a nursing home. The coworker thought Tiny was twelve, which would make him around twenty when he died. If so he lived to be a truly venerable tomcat.
I think it’s interesting: generally the lives of our pets are subsumed in our own, we usually get them at or near their birth, and accompany them through their deaths. But Tiny was a different case: he had already experienced relatively generous cat-span, from kittenhood well into cat middle age, under totally different management. He had a life before Jennifer (and eventually the two of us). It gave him a certain quality of experience. It reminded me that as small and brief as a life may be, it has its own singular view, memory, yes, in the end the only word that sums it up is experience. You can’t own anyone else’s and no one can own yours or take it away from you. Tiny was his own cat.
If I remember this is shortly after Jennie and I started dating, a couple years still before we moved in together. I remember that after she moved him in, to this garden level place she had on Garfield in Uptown, he straightaway hid under the bathtub for a couple of days. Of course he warmed to her. I believe he was the first pet she ever had living on her own. I fancied that he seemed to view the increasing frequency and duration of my visits to her with some alarm, and of course she was spending more time at my place as well (I had cable), leaving him to fend against boredom on his own. Beyond the bare facts related a paragraph above she didn’t know much of his history - being as how he belonged to an elderly lady of the aunt-of-a-lawyer type, probably he was rather doted on. It’s safe to say, at least, that he was seldom refused any desire in the way of food, because when he moved in with Jennifer Tiny was one fat kitty.
Yes, for most of the rest of his life Tiny’s name, inherited along with the cat himself, was a jest: he was a big fellah. Of only medium build, but of impressive girth, not flabby folds of loose fat but solid packed, dense lard like only a neutered tom can pack on. Big and fuzzy, this amazing, silky-soft gray and white shorthair coat. Golden eyes. A big handsome cat.
As I say, of course due to her natural charm, lovable person and loving spirit, Tiny quickly overcame his understandable reticence at the sudden, radical shift in his life and grew to dote as much on Jennie as his former mistress (doubtless also passed away by now) must have doted on him.
So I imagine it was a big shock to the system when he moved in with the two of us.
That was as far as I got. It’s been a long, long time since the death of a pet affected me as much as Tiny’s did - not, basically, since I was a young child. I don’t have much to say one way or the other about whether it is foolish or merely human to find one’s self seriously grieving over the death of an animal. Grief is grief, and interrogating its justification, or playing a game of relative importance with all the death that goes on always, all the time and everywhere, seems a truly pointless pursuit to me. It made me sad: I cried. I didn’t want to write about it anymore. And so time, as is its nature, stretched out. It starts with, I’ll finish that later, and then too much time passes, and other things crowd in, and pretty soon the whole train of thought is lost. Tiny lived and he died: he was a good cat, he had a lot of personality. I still miss him, it still makes me sad that he doesn’t exist in this world anymore.
But I will admit another, less sincere reason that made me reluctant to write and post about this small loss in my life at the time. It seemed, oh, like that sort of very personal, diary-esque, day in the life kind of thing you see so much of in personal writing on the internet. It seemed, in a word, like the kind of thing you’d read in a blog.
Part 2: It’s a Blog, it’s a Blog, It’s a BLAAAAWG!
I hate, hate, HATE the word blog. For starts, it’s a stupid construction. You don’t call a hat rack a track, okay? And what’s the deal with the underlying term, anyway? Web log? Ships have logs (which ships’ logs you don’t call plogs or slogs, by the by, now do you?) Captain Kirk has a log. Desk jockeys and would-be writers do not have logs. Maybe they have diaries or journals or news summaries or whatever. Add to these objections the fact that the resulting, inaccurate and misbegotten term you end up with just sounds stupid. It’s sounds like onomatopoeia for your cat horking up a hairball. Maybe it meant something to the people who coined it, but now it’s just symptomatic of society’s need to package and compartmentalize anything new and emergent for ready discussion in a five minute news blip. It’s a meaningless term, applied indiscriminately to a hugely diverse range of output which have almost nothing in common, except that they are online and (more or less) regularly updated. It’s just a medium. Applying stupid made-up terms to it is entirely counterproductive.
So every time someone would write or say something to me about my “blog” I just wanted to scream: “it’s not a blawg! It’s a magazine. That was my conceit. And I confess: the only thing that kept me from simply going outright and writing this very screed on this very subject, up to this point, was that, well, it seemed like the sort of thing you would find written in a (shudder) blawg.
Well, hell with it. It’s hosted by “blogspot.” I go to “blogger.com” to log into it. The URL for the thing is “waah.waah.itsnotablogitsamagazine.blogspot.com. It’s got that wretched most recent first organization designed for regular posting and regular consumption, useless for navigating serial writing, where the first thing written is the first thing that should be read, not buried somewhere in the all-but-unnavigable archives. It’s a blog. I surrender.
The irony is that this admission actually frees me from artificial restrictions. Who needs covers, tables of contents? It’s not like it’s a magazine or something... it’s just a blog! Damn the torpedoes!
But it still doesn’t tell me what its for.
Part 3: What it’s for.
I get very hung up on questions of this nature. What’s it for? What’s life for? I try not to but I do. It’s all very Philosophy of Art 101, what’s art for? And you just know you’re about to have a long, boring, contentious discussion which concludes absolutely nothing. Everybody ends up grumpily conceding that they are unable to supply an answer that does not seem either arbitrary and incomplete or else utterly subjective.
A while ago, I was having a conversation via email with a friend about some of the writing here, about the science in the article about making soap. The specific discussion was fairly esoteric, a couple of former students of science discussing nomenclature, but he said something that got me thinking.
As far as your blog goes I have always thought of it as a public writing portfolio of Jon. If you ever applied for a writing job you would be able to show it as part of your application or resume.
It was a comment that inspired a few thoughts in me. The first was, it reminded me that this was indeed one of my original objectives: creating a sort of more formal writing space that could serve as an accessible portfolio. Beyond this I hoped to raise a little money and encourage myself to keep at writing.
Well, I have to say it pretty much failed in all regards. This thing is a mess, trying to be too many things at once, articles and bits of weird fiction and sad little attempts to navigate some narrow space between humor and a straight up guilt trip trying to cajole putative readers into coughing up more cash. I would never in hell want to use it as a professional portfolio. It is what it is, and I really don’t have anything against it, but it’s just not that.
But it hasn’t really shaped up into something I want to pursue, in its past form, either. I still would like to write about Jonah’s early days in the hospital, that strange and harrowing introduction to parenting Jennifer and I got, but that isn’t where I’m at right now. I don’t even want to try to wrap up the series on music. I’ve been trying to write something original and significant on what the whole online scene means in terms of the creation and distribution of music for about five years now, and I’m ready to admit defeat. What that seems to boil down to is that, while the reality of digital transfer would seem to make the distribution of music accessible to almost anyone on almost any level possible, a combination of a dearth of decent filtering for the insane volume of output by the world population of musicians with wildly diverse levels of ability, combined with the utter inertia of “the industry,” and the fact that the interest the vast majority of people in downloading music seems to be mainly getting the same old garbage, but for free, are conspiring, now and for the foreseeable future, to make this supposed potential still very much a minor bit of noise in the face of the dominating blare of the business as usual of the recording industry, the multimedia conglomerates, and the broadcasting scam. Time Warner and Clearchannel, in a nutshell, are still mostly winning the war for ears. That’s not very well stated, but it still doesn’t seem to justify hacking out a couple thousand words to try to make it sound smarter. So to hell with that.
Part 4: All Bets are Off.
So this is the deal, then: all bets are off. The issue of a writing portfolio remains, but I’ve realized that it is something that needs to be created in its own right, tailored to fit the job, polished and presented in a way I don’t want or need this to be, and if I actually pull it together the way I think it would have to be, published in an online space that doesn’t include a URL component like “blogspot.com.” The issue of money is just one I have to deal with on a completely other basis. What part writing plays in this right here and now I don’t know, but anyway I’m going to stop pushing the patronage concept: it’s done all it can for me, and it’s time to move on to other opportunities. Beyond this there is the issue, illuminated and magnified for me by all these considerations, of just what it is I actually want to do. I guess that’s one I’ve been screwing around with as long as I can remember, but at the moment I’ve decided that the answer is that yes, I want to write, and what I want to write right at this moment is fiction. I have two serious projects in progress, novels, and that’s where I’m going to focus the vast majority of my time.
That leaves this. I could abandon the whole thing, I suppose. It’s not like I’m constantly getting hammered with anxious emails begging for more blog. But I’m not going to do that. Instead, what you get here for the time being is bizarre serialized science fiction for the masses, something old and mostly written that needs only minor editing for presentation, so it won’t take up much of my time. It’s not very well suited to this mode of presentation, but that’s life. I’ve had some entirely justified comments about the site being difficult to navigate, but after giving the matter some thought I’ve come to the conclusion that it mostly comes down to the fact of the way the software is set up, and it’s just not worth the effort involved to try to make it work all that much better.
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