Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
I’m thinking more about the concept behind discarding weblog archives. I’ve been re-reading some old posts, some nice and some not so nice. Those posts that are a year or two old aren’t even recognizable.
I’ve earned the sobriquet “Burningbird” honestly, as I’ve been nothing if not hot in much of my writing. Passionate, yes, and there’s nothing wrong with passion. But there’s also a lot of anger and pettishness and I cringe to see me in these words.
If I wanted to grow my popularity, I would feed the fire because this attracts the links, the comments, and the discussions. The more petulant the tone, the more vicious the words, the more noise and flurry of activity—flies around shit. Played correctly, I could even become an A-lister someday, until I burn up and become nothing but a cinder, driving away all that’s important.
Lately, life intrudes and does so significantly, and I just don’t want to feed the flames. Being passionate about causes, yes; more now than ever. Being passionate about truth, yes; the truth is threatened daily. But fighting with other webloggers—the nit nitting, the pick picking— it’s getting old. It gets older, with each level of dust layered on the history of this weblog.
If you all met me in person, you’d be disappointed. I’m not the person in my words, in these pages that stretch back like too long a road. They are a caricature of me, and I am only a faint shadow in them.