What The Hell?

Two entries in one day? OK, something must definitely be wrong.  Yeah, lots of things are wrong, but that's not the point.

Earlier today I spent a few hours writing the previous post, only to later discover that in Ready The Invocation Array, roughly a year ago, I made a very similar argument, although sans ad hominem attacks against someone who I had not heard of at the time and, by extension, considerably less swearing (who gives a fuck about that?). So that got me thinking, because that's what I do - and the more my universe implodes, the more I try to science my way to a solution - I wonder how many people who write blogs (random personal shit, not Mansonesque self-help claptrap) or keep journals ever go back and read their old writing and discover that nothing has really changed - i.e., they are still fighting the same battles, perhaps if on different battlefields - and how many of them actually discover that they've fundamentally evolved (or devolved) and are materially different than they were N years ago. Certainly we might expect people who were childhood or teenage authors that are adults today to have a greater likelihood of undergoing change, but since that wasn't me (actually, it was, but when I was an angsty teenager everything I wrote was on that old-fashioned construct they call paper), I guess I'm more curious about the experience of adults (e.g., me) who engage in this exercise.

I've done it in sporadic fashion here and there back when LiveJournal was a thing, and I've even referenced my old LJ in older posts on this blog, which is coming up on three years old now. What I haven't done, and what I think might be illuminating, is a systematic review of the literature - get all my old LJ data and actually post it here, and then read through ALL of it. Read it critically. Determine if I've made any progress towards building a better blackbird or if I'm just a shitbird in disguise and see if I can figure out why and where I've succeeded and failed while also managing not to delude myself in one direction or the other. I might not like the answer. I might be pleasantly surprised. The reality is probably somewhere in the middle. What I do know just in reviewing the contents of what's already been written here is that 2018 was a lot like 2017, and I feel like I spent a lot of time in 2018 trying to fix the same shit that made 2017 miserable. Yeah, some things are definitely different, or at least they feel different - but maybe they aren't if I go back far enough.

So I'm going to go fish out all my old LJ data and start posting it here from the beginning. This means that a lot of the next entries are going to be VERY old and certainly not in chronological order unless I consciously backdate it all. Not sure if I want to go through the effort of doing that as it will make my project more difficult, but it would also add an element of accuracy if I can just start at the beginning and read forward. Hopefully my LJ is still around and I remember the damn password; I can't even remember the last time I wrote something there.

Unleash the hounds!