Eleventh Blogiversary: Looking Backward (and Ahead)

It's been (roughly) eleven years since that fateful spring day when, from a humble Brooklyn apartment, a couple of good friends and I launched Triptych Cryptic: The Heretic Monkey of Weblogs. We started on my Geocities account, though we'd moved elsewhere long before Yahoo shut that down. We were joined over the years by a few other friends, carrying on until we finally called it quits last year. I started cryptonaut-in-exile before TC ended, but didn't consolidate my TC posts (many of them anyways) from the archives into this site until TC was gone. I'm not quite sure where to peg my blogiversary because I may have mislabeled my second post as my first in the export/import process. I'm pretty sure on TC we listed March 26, 2000 as our start date, so even though the first post wasn't mine, I'm still thinking of that as the blogiversary worth noting.

Anyways, I've been doing this one way or another at least 11, if not 12, years. (Had a blog pre-Triptych Cryptic as well, but that's lost in the mists of time.) While I miss the camaraderie of ol' TC, I have to say I'm kind of proud of this solo effort. Sure, I make typos when I'm too eager to hit 'Publish,' and I've bored and irritated a few people, but it wouldn't be reflective of my personality otherwise, right?

I'm forty now, almost certainly more than half way to my grave so it could just as easily be said I'm dying as much as living -- not to be morbid, I'm going somewhere with this -- and it doesn't look like I'm ever going start, never mind finish, the novels I was sure as a youth I had ready to burst forth from my overheated imagination. This blog then looks like it will serve as my written legacy. I don't particularly care if I have a tombstone or a marker somewhere after I shuffle off this mortal coil. However, upon reflection, I would kind of like a holographic video recording, à la Tasha Yar's but, should technology not deliver, I'm hoping this blog will be something my progeny will be able to access for a glimpse into my thoughts and interests. (Sorry about the language, future little ones, if you're out there, I was occasionally foul-mouthed.)

As a kid, I loved going through my grandparents' old stuff. I wanted to see pictures of them when they were young, and learn about what was going on in the world that had an effect on them. Even as a kid, I was fascinated by the idea that who we are is shaped by our environment and by our genetic inheritance. I could see in the old, black and white photos of my grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles as kids themselves, how they looked so similar to how my brother and I looked at the same age. My paternal grandfather's very posture in one picture from his WWII days in the Navy looked like it could have been of my dad or any of my uncles. If they looked like me, walked like me, talked like me, how much did they think like me? So much of that is gone now, dispersed or destroyed. Even my memories, sadly, get jumbled or buried so deep I'm not sure they're there. If my kids are like me, I think they'll be curious about the interconnectedness of things, of people, and I hope to leave them something more than a few scraps of evidence to satisfy that curiosity.

There's the possibility, of course, that this blog will be as inaccessible to them as recordings on reel-to-reel tape are to me now. I don't know how people will interact with the internet five years from now, never mind 50. Maybe I should think about doing an annual blog-to-print just in case ... since all my books will (hopefully!) end up with Blake and Amelia eventually, that might be the best way to hedge against a rapid technology shift.

So, Google, stay in business, don't make me move this stuff around again. I'm counting on you to be like Levi Strauss and Macy's, at least, if not Keiunkan.