Blogging Nostalgia

Am I the only one who misses that era of about 2008ish where everyone had a blog and part of the day’s ritual was to read all of your friends’ recent posts?  Every once in awhile I peruse the lists of sites from my now-defunct RSS Reader and I can recall the thrill of having so many writerly friends that I heard from nearly every day.  But mostly I miss the thrill and energy of regularly writing for an audience–my writing muscles have become pretty flaccid these past few years.

This quotation, from one of my most favorite articles about blogs, sums up the magic of the phenomenon so well:

Finally, I think I get the superhero fixation. It’s the flying. It’s the suspension of punctuation and good manners and even identity. Bloggers at their computers are Supermen in flight. They break the rules. They go into their virtual phone booths, put on their costumes, bring down their personal villains, and save the world. Anonymous or not, they inhabit that source of power and hope. Then they come back to their jobs, their dogs, and their lives, and it’s like, “Dude, the ball.”

Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can’t fake that. ?

(Note: the peonies have nothing to do with blogging, but they seemed worth including anyways…)