The Homecoming

In the long-bygone year of 2004 - a year in which I lived in my parents' basement, a perpetually-infected spiked nose ring adorning my face as I listened to Skinny Puppy on a discman and made weird collages to impress a guy in a black metal band - I started something called a 'blog'. Indeed, in this near-prehistoric time, well before the phenomena of Instagram, facebook, twitter, or even myspace were more than flashes of binary code in the minds of their crafty creators - when Missy Elliot was asking us all if, indeed, it WAS worth it, were she to work it - two whole years, even, before JT brought sexy back..perhaps, before sexy even LEFT, ((several reliable sources pinpoint sexy's departure as sometime in the early months of 2005)) - the blog reigned supreme as the primary vehicle for self-promotion and the creation of a virtual image on the internet. Not only that though, the blogosphere offered the catharsis of self-reflection, of potentially-obsessive navel-gazing, and in my case, it became the main outlet into which I poured a surfeit of childish hopes, morose musings and brutally-raw heartaches.

It started out as a lark; something to appease a friend who had recommended that I try my hand at it. I was of course no stranger to the art of self-analysis. I had pretty much always kept a journal; in fact, my former paper journal, a formidable, giant black binder encompassing every painful and irrelevant moment of my life from 1993-2002, inclusive, languishes even now under my bed, solemnly and slowly collecting dust. Once I embraced the digitized version of "dear diary", I found that I took to it with surprising alacrity and unbridled enthusiasm. Not only that, I developed a small yet appreciative readership and made some friends through livejournal who are still in my life today, including a fellow Doukhobor with whom it turned out I had a familial connection that went back several generations.

A fairly serious mental health crisis in the years 2008-09 rendered me virtually-unable to write and reflect, and my old livejournal fell into disuse. I still go back to look at it from time to time, which is a sensation akin to purusing photos of the dilapidated ferris wheel in the abandoned city of Pripyat - fascination, and a certain amount of horror. Recently,  I was shocked and terribly flattered to learn that an old friend, who himself has now taken up blogging, still revisits the wasteland that is my livejournal, still reads it for inspiration in his own writing. (You can visit his offerings and sardonic yet hilarious commentary about the many things he hates here:  https://crimsonhighway.wordpress.com)
 He has repeatedly goaded me to begin writing again. And thus, here we are.

 Bring back the totally unfashionable and tedious art of the blog, I say! Too long have we languished in the shallow cesspools of social media. The sincerity of true introspection and thoughtful prose has given way to the glaring megalomania of the profile pic, the hashtag, the tweet. It's so much easier and more efficient for us to consume each other, now; only now, there is even less substance for us to actually consume. It passes right through us, this slurry of snapchats and selfies, offering little in the way of intellectual or spiritual nourishment. And while I can't promise that reading this is going to provide anyone with their recommended daily  intake of vitamins and minerals, I can at least guarantee that writing it is going to be a great outlet for the constant, swirling vortex of thoughts that rattle around in my head on a daily basis.

 Like an old, sea-weary salmon, I shall return to my source, struggling upstream against the current to conceive something of myself, before it's too late. And like Missy Elliot, I'm going to put my thing down. Maybe I'll even flip it and reverse it.

 I'm probably going to write a lot of silly stuff, and a lot of sad stuff, and a lot of stuff that no one wants to read, but at least I'm going to write it for me.

At last, and again, a chance to say nothing about something, instead of merely something about nothing.