1. Back when I started making posts to this blog in October of 2006, I madly enjoyed finding other bloggers. I discovered some of them through Huckleberries Online, for starters, and, back then, Google's blogging platform, called Blogger, had a function called something like "Search Blogs" and I remember being able to perform random searches and browse people's blogs. I loved many of the blogs I found -- I had some really interesting and satisfying correspondence with some of these bloggers, both through comments on the blogs or through email. It was by browsing blogs with this search feature that I found Clare Law's Three Beautiful Things. As I compose this post, I can hardly remember all the blogs I used to read -- I followed a blind tango dancer writing from Montreal, a cultural blog called 2 Blowhards (a gold mine, back then, for links to other blogs), a very interesting woman who had gone to the University of Idaho and whose husband was from Eugene and wrote terrific posts, a woman on The Atlantic coast (as I remember) who had a lot on her mind, wrote about it, and we sometimes wrote back and forth, and many others. I also enjoyed contributing to what I'll call a community blog, called Sunday Scribblings, in response to prompts, and I also used to submit to a community photo blog -- I can't remember the name of it.
I also enjoyed writing and reading Sibling Assignments and miss responding to those prompts and reading what Carol and Christy had on their minds.
I couldn't really say when blogging seemed to reach its peak and began to decline, but it seemed to correlate with the growing popularity of Facebook and, possibly, Twitter. Or, who knows? -- maybe people writing blogs ran out of things to write about, or lost interest in making posts. I don't really know.
I do know that the decline has been disappointing, but, I suppose, inevitable.
Over on the right rail of my blog, under Silver Veins, sits my current list of links to different blogs (and other sites) and soon I'm going to edit that list and delete some of the links.
Today I clicked through it. I can't access some sites because they went private and I would need an invitation to read them. More often than not, the blogs/sites have gone dormant -- no posts for four, eight, or more years.
The upshot: today I spent time fondly remembering how much fun I had, starting in October, 2006, when I was active in a small slice of the blogging world. I continue to blog, mostly because it helps me clear my mind for the upcoming day, keeps me focused on things I enjoy each day, and lays down a daily record of what I've been up to, a record that I refer to often when trying to piece together memories.
I think I'll poke around on the World Wide Web again and see if I can find active bloggers again whose work I might enjoy reading and get back to reading those blogs on my list that are still active.
2. Early this afternoon, I drove out to the Pinehurst/Pine Creek Trailhead on the Trail of the CdAs and walked for a half an hour, not only for exercise, but to try to get back into photography groove -- which I've been out of for a year. It'll be a while before I decide how things went today with my camera.
It's funny. I got off the freeway at Smelterville, drove through town, and came into the trailhead parking lot from the east. While fall colors are abounding, it was dilapidated cars I really wanted to photograph. Nickerson's Towing is in Smelterville and possesses quite an inventory of cars in disrepair. On down the road, on the south side, someone has a property with a bunch of vehicles out of commission, all of which look they'd make, to my taste, excellent subjects for pictures.
But, I don't feel right about taking such pictures here in the Silver Valley. I'm so unsure about whether it would be a welcome sight for the people who own these cars to see a guy poking around with a camera that I imagine the pictures, but don't take them.
I like taking pictures of things falling apart, of houses, garages, cars, structures with peeling paint, rust spots, sagging roofs, and so on. Plenty opportunities exist in the Silver Valley to take such pictures, but I'm wary about taking them and, so far, haven't.
3. Today I discovered a website called 98bowery.com. It's a gallery of pictures and writings by Marc H. Miller. The pictures are of artists' and musicians' and poets' lives and work taken between 1969 and 1989. If you go to this page and click on the link in the upper part of the page entitled, "98 Bowery, 1969-89" and scroll down to a picture captioned "Shannon and Collins" and click on it, a set of photos will pop up of Billy Collins and his friend Mike Shannon, pictures taken nearly fifty years ago, and you'll find a picture of the front cover of the first issue of Mid-Atlantic Review, co-edited by Billy Collins, and you'll find a picture of two of his very early poems that appeared in this issue.
Even if you aren't into Billy Collins, if you are interested in the Lower East Side, the emergence of punk, the old days at CBGB, and the visual art of this period, you might want to hang out at 98bowery.com for a while and click around.
A limerick by Stu:
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