The First Post

In which the author wishes he were already an established blogger

I find the thought of blogging to be stressful, as I feel that there are too many variables to be considered in a blog’s beginnings. It is not that I am worried about posting personal information from the standpoint of privacy—after all, I’m about to invest all of my time and money in an mfa program in order to learn how to better exploit my life, friends, and family for the sake of literary nonfiction and my own personal gain—but, rather, I worry about privacy stylistically. How self-aware does one have to be? Do I refer to myself in third or first person? Do I give out my name at all, or pluralize myself as some do, becoming “we” when I am quite obviously “I”? Then there is the subject of others that may come up in my writing. Do I refer to my boyfriend by name? Perhaps by initial, or by Dandelion, or by a completely neutral “the boy”? Do I write of him at all?

Every blog I’ve read consistently over the last few years has some sort of shtick, some sense of continuity, even if it is as simple as a snide review of fashion or a collection of news relating to a particular culture. And even past the content itself looms aesthetic choices of fonts, colors, and leading, and the obligatory introductory first entry that I have so dreaded. Several of my friends have begun blogging, enjoying the sense of expression and becoming accustomed to calculating how exactly to relate events to their blogger or wordpress pages, but I’ve resisted the urge to join them because of these anxieties. And then, I found a floppy disk drive.

For the last five years or so I’ve carried around an unmarked floppy disk wedged into the binding of an old leather-bound journal. This is a blank, lined book that an ex-boyfriend gave me for Christmas one year and, like every other journal I have ever attempted to keep, it ends abruptly about twenty pages in from the cover. Toward the back of the journal sits an inch of pages ripped from similar abandoned diaries, all beginning with similar self-promises that they would serve as the document of record; that they would be filled completely.

The little disk, with it’s tiny storage capacity and bent metal slider, is where I kept the Notepad text document that served as my journal during middle school, beginning at the age of 12. While its paper brethren were always aborted after a handful of entries, despite my love of inky pens and flamboyant loops, I found it easy to keep up with the .txt diary. The journal was complicated, I recall, with brief character explanations at the beginning and a sort of forward that explained the reasons for recording my thoughts, though I cannot remember exactly what this introduction said other than begging anyone who loved me not to read on. The body text followed a complicated system of colors and codewords so that if it were to be found, the reader would not immediately be privy to my most private thoughts. For example, instead of reading “I am concerned about the ever-growing lustful feelings I have toward my best friend Ben,” the text read, “I am concerned about the ever-growing lustful feelings I have toward someone.” While I’m certain that circumstantial evidence would easily identify Ben if, say, my mother had stumbled upon the journal, I like to think that my wording was adequately stealthy.

Somewhere around the age of 15 I stopped writing in the in my pixilated journal and, as we phased new technology into my household, none of our PCs were equipped with floppy drives. The disk sat in it’s hiding place, stashed behind a pull-out drawer underneath my bed beside a pack of cigarettes or bag of pot or whatever it was that I wanted to keep out of view as a teenager, until it came time to move from Odessa and it found new homes, wedged between books in my dorm room or locked away in a trunk as I moved from on- to off-campus housing. On occasion I would stumble across it and for a few days I would look around campus and my friends’ rooms, hoping to eye an archaic machine begging for juicy gossip written in Courier New.

Finally I found that machine, just a few days ago, in the office of the family whom I am living with in Fort Worth before moving to New York for grad school 24 days from now. When I realized that literally three yards from my bed sat a slow, dying machine that could provide me with fodder for countless essays, I tore through my still-boxed belongings until I found the infamous disk, hidden, still, with the things I wanted to keep private.

The black disk that I have held on to through all of these years contains a single file: an essay on Macbeth that I wrote my senior year in high school. Apparently, in haste, I needed the disk in order to print something off at school and, wisely, removed my journal before taking it off to a common area. I would not, however, have simply deleted the document, for I am and have been nothing if not a hoarder of nostalgia and personal reflections. So my journal remains out there somewhere, I must believe, in a place that my 17-year-old self would have thought it to be safe and remembered. All of my old computers are long gone, but is it on one of the many burned CDs floating around my boxed belongings at my mother’s home in Odessa? Is it stashed in a notebook somewhere, or sitting in the email accounts of one of my old addresses whose passwords have faded with time? And knowing my penchant for secrecy and coding, even as a high schooler, I can’t help but wonder if Macbeth plays a role in all of this, and that it’s sitting wedged between acts II and III or my “Side-By-Side Shakespeare” copy of the play which resides in storage with my father, amid a mountain of other books somewhere in Abilene, Texas.
There’s a good chance that I’ll never again see this text file that has achieved epic importance in my mind, but that is not to say that I won’t always hope to find it when rummaging through old boxes or files one day. With hope, it will be at a time when floppy disk drives are still used somewhere in the world.

I discovered the Macbeth file on Monday, the day before I left for New York to find an apartment, and around the time I realized my summer of reading and writing, the summer that I was going to engross myself in nonfiction and write with all of my spare time, had been less, if at all, productive. Therein lies my shtick: my gimmick. I am moving to New York from a lifetime in Texas and I need a way to keep track of it all. I need a place to record my spare thoughts and observations for the sake of posterity, because disks can be lost and command-f search function doesn’t work with handwritten texts that I never seem to be able to keep up with anyway. And of course, this will be a great place to indulge myself, believing that there are people out there who want to be kept up to date with what I am doing.

I am Jeramey, and this is my blog.