End of the Beginning
I'm less than five weeks away from my public, civil, and religious commitment to a 27-year-old woman from Union County, New Jersey, and I've been unable to find the desire to record my thoughts. Instead, I've been meekly trying to complete this entry for over a month. Every time I start a sentence, my cells flood with disinterest and I close the window. This is unfortunate, as this site, in some form or another, has served as my front-facing communication solution since 2000. While over the past years I've found the time to assess the social implications of a co-worker flossing while I was taking a crap, the physics behind the riding of a koala bear, and the revulsion of those who recklessly use terms like "gang" and "ciao", I've found myself unwilling to write during what is arguably the most important weeks this blog has ever experienced.
When I started writing in 2000, blogs were new. The very concept of an "online journal" provided enough novelty to maintain an audience, regardless of the content. This is no longer true. Technology has delivered new ways to present content. If you still have a blog, it has to stay ahead of the curve with interesting or niche content. Just being a blog isn't enough. Initially, I never intended to write about my day-to-day life. My first ever posts were made to avoid having to send mass emails as I traveled across the world for the first time. Blogs are obviously at their best when the writer is doing something interesting that people want to hear about. Originally, my trip provided that content, and subsequent years have been punctuated by the occasionally interesting experience. In between these interesting experiences are mostly private experiences, which, while interesting, cannot be presented to the public in the form of a blog. Feelings would be hurt. Boring experiences fill the remaining void, and boring experiences aren't worth writing blogs about. They are supposed to be Twittered or thrown on Facebook. Life can now be successfully be updated in twenty word status updates. Two thousand word entries seem wasteful. Everyone is online. Everyone is posting. Our attention spans are under assault. You cannot keep up. Content is flooding the internet, in some sense polluting the ideal of quality I once strived for. Just because you can self-publish, doesn't mean you should.
Furthering the slow, but certain, demise of this blog, is the reality that I no longer have an audience. The group I once wrote to so many years ago has dissipated and fragmented, leaving individual readers who no longer even know the people or places I spend most of the time with these days. There is no relevance.
In short, times have changed, and my forthcoming wedding has confirmed this fact more than any other, which is directly why the issue of this blog has been brought to a head.
Half the attendees at my bachelor party are people I met in New York. None of those people read this blog.
Half the people this blog was originally started to keep updated weren't even invited to the wedding. Some of the ones who were invited aren't coming (or responding at all, particularly those based in Seattle). This follows logic. To some extent, those friendships are locked in the past. We shared a common time and lay claim to the same memories, but they reside in the past (when I weighed thirty pounds less).
This blog never caught on with my family. My dad still thinks the internet is the name of a fishing apparatus. Writing about the stress his recent declaration of bankruptcy has placed upon the planning of this wedding wouldn't serve much purpose. Debbie may peek in every now and then, but her blog better explains the issues where our lives intersect, particularly when those issues involve Airbuses that break apart in the sky, in a way I promised was mechanically impossible and understandably damages the fragile truce recently made with a fear of flying.
Some have issued complaints about the cost of attending a New York wedding. This is an inevitable byproduct of the aforementioned life changes. Everyone now lives in different places and varying levels of family building. This is simply a consequence of getting married in my thirties. I've paid my own dues. I've spent over $12,000 in the past four years attending five destination weddings and two bachelor parties. The bulk of these trips came in the first few years of my move to NYC to start a new career, during which I made $35,000 dollars a year while crippled with $60,000 in school debt. Ironically, the people who have bitched the most to me have the most (Lee will still be trying to sleep on my couch when he is 58 and has four kids).
In other ways, the old group continues to impress. In an epic show of class, the friends whose wedding I most regret not being able to get to in the past years, P and Rosie, have been the most gracious and accommodating in their attempts to make it to mine. To you, I can only offer my sincere apology. Had I known at the time the immense amount of emotional energy and effort it take to plan a wedding (and the importance of RSVP cards), I would have sacrificed what was needed to come out. Hector and Gao never hesitated in their acceptance. Ditto to Kenta, Kenny, Noah, Katie, Taj. I appreciate the sacrifices. As I know, it takes supreme effort.
To those who have recently been laid off, I'd suggest a career as a babysitter, as i've been told California has a severe shortage of them.
This entry has proved the point. I had to write all of these reflections in one bulk entry, when instead it should have either been broken up into a thousand separate status updates, turned into a comedy piece, or funneled into a short film rant. The blog has served its purpose nobly. But unless I suddenly get a job as Megan Fox's personal assistant, or attempt to sail around the world in a beer keg, or become a White House correspondent, it is time for this blog to get in step with all the other changes that have swept through our world.
Thanks to those of you who have stuck around this long. I look forward to delivering content to you in new, exciting, and, hopefully, entertaining ways.
