Happy belated blogiversary to meeeeeee

I was reading a story by the late Kage Baker called "The Angel in the Darkness" a little while ago. In it, a woman about my age deals with the death of her father. Reading about her reactions made me think about my own reactions to the death of my father back in 2005, reactions recorded and preserved here on my blog. That made me think about my blog, and all the events recorded here, all the thoughts that I wrote down and shared over the years, and it made me think about how I've been neglecting it lately, and made me think about how many years had passed since I started it. Then I realized that my blogiversary - the anniversary of the day I started blogging - was sometime in May. A quick check showed that my ninth blogiversary had, in fact, already been and gone. My first (official) blog post was written on May 14, 2004.

A lot has happened and been recorded on this blog in that time. It seemed like I had been blogging forever when my father died, but in fact I had been at it only fifteen months. Haley died, and Ashes, and Minnie. I went to the beach, I started an exercise routine with Haley, and I stopped after Haley died. I went to Ireland, for the third and last time, and visited London for the first time. I bought my grandmother's house. My house was robbed. I lost my job at the place I had worked at for fifteen years. I went back to work as a production worker a few months later, and lost that job three years later. I went back as a temporary and worked my butt off for a few weeks. Eventually I got a job at another place, much closer to home. I have racked up hundreds of thousands of miles on my car. I have studied photovoltaic technology. I have joined a writing group. I have started other blogs, and as a result of one of them I have appeared on TV almost every week for the past year and a half.

I've watched most of the bloggers who were blogging when I started shut down their blogs and move on with their lives. Even many of the blogs I started reading over the years have shut down. Blogs that are updated with any regularity are few and far between these days.

I don't know why this is for everybody else. Maybe blogging was just a fad. Maybe it was a phase that many of us outgrew. Maybe other social networking tools, like Facebook and Twitter, consume our precious Blogging Energy Units and leave use too spent to say anything new. Maybe modern computing tools, smartphones and iPads and things like that, have made it too tedious to type more than 140 characters at a time. Maybe we've said everything we've had to say.

I'm not done, not yet. I've got my reasons and excuses for not blogging, but I'm not ready to shut down Another Monkey. I don't know if I'll ever blog as much as I used to, when I maintained a post-a-day minimum. I don't know if the blogosphere will ever be what it once was, when it felt like there was an enormous global conversation going on, when I would read and comment on updates from friends in Norway, Australia, England, and all over the U.S. Maybe there are loads of vibrant new blogs out there just waiting to be discovered. Maybe my friends who have backed away from blogging will pick up the practice once again. Who knows? Who can say? We'll see where things stand a year from last Tuesday, when I'm celebrating - or forgetting - my tenth blogiversary.