Writings
Ultimately, the written word and human expression is an ephemeral thing, and the Internet has accelerated the onset of irrelevance. How much of everything written in 1909 still remains today? Probably only a fraction of the letters, newspapers and books. But whatever that number is, it will probably dwarf what will be left of our digital expression in a century’s time. Hey, forget a century — try five years.
In the past four years, I’ve started a number of blogs, and simply clicking “delete” can pretty well eliminate most traces of all of that. Sure, I know Google probably has an archive of it somewhere, but the average person would be hard-pressed to find it a year or two down the line. Maybe that’s no great loss because much of blogging is a barometer of feelings at a particular moment. Riffing on a squirrel electrocuted on a transformer and the resulting power outage across Southwest Fort Worth may be amusing for the people in that part of the city on that day, but does it need to be saved for posterity’s sake? Probably not.
However, when I read a Master’s thesis about the role of blogging and newspapers in attitudes about urban gas drilling a few years ago, I realized at the time that the thesis itself will far outlast the stories I wrote that were referenced in that paper. I’m OK with that. Much of the beauty of life is living in the moment. Nonetheless, I wanted to save a few of those stories that were some of my favorites. There’s no real thread to these — they are what they are. Maybe they make sense. Maybe you’ll enjoy them. I just wasn’t ready to let them go yet. Here they are:
