One of the benefits to manually going through old weblog postings and other articles—to see which to keep and which to 410—is re-reading old work. When you haven’t looked at the material in several years, reading your old stuff is like reading something someone else wrote.
It’s surprising what you can learn about yourself when you read your old writings. For instance, among my older works, some of it is still good, even among the technical work, which typically has a short shelf life. All of the keepers are being moved to RealTech.
Most of the Missouri-related writings are decent, and I’ve managed to stuff MissouriGreen with both photos and stories about places I’ve been. Other of my work, such as reviews of books, and readings of poetry are timeless, and they’ve gone to Just Shelley; same with my movie reviews, which have gone to Secret of Signals. Too much of my old stuff, though, is just plain dated, with inside jokes even I can no longer remember. We all took ourselves way too seriously at one time.
The work I’ve enjoyed re-reading the most, though, is what I call “writing just to write”. I haven’t done enough of this type of writing in the last several years. Too busy fussing about things that, when you look back, don’t make no matter, as my grandmother would say.
Now that I’ve got my site where I want it to be, hopefully I’ll have more time for “writing just to write”. Now that I’ve also seen what a silly ass I’ve been in the past, I’ll spend less time on the “don’t make no matter”.
In the meantime, I’m pulling a few of the older stories out, and pushing them in front of you, one more time. Maybe you’ll like them. Maybe you won’t. If you do like them, good. If you don’t, well, it don’t make no matter.
