Poster's Fervour

It's funny, since opening this tab again yesterday and posting (twice lol), all I've been able to think about is how much of my life I haven't documented here. How much of the story is missing. I'm sure there will be plenty of time to tell those stories and fill in gaps; but there's nothing quite like reading a post written while the memories were fresh and coming back to it years later and discovering those lost moments and thoughts all over again.

I know this is in part poster's fervour. Right now in my brain this is the shiny new (well, definitely not new, but renewed, perhaps?) thing, so naturally my brain has latched on. I know in a week, or even a few days, this will fade, but fuck it. Let's capture what we can while we're here, on this open tab, in this headspace.

Enjoying the Summer Sublime

 

This isn’t my first mango of the season. It is delicious though.

I have been trying to allow myself small indulgences on the weekly grocery shop. Without an income and while stretching my savings out as far as they’ll go, this isn’t always easy to do, but I can afford a single mango every second or third shop. 

I only get them when they’re good. Properly ripe, firm but not too firm. Made the mistake of buying one that was too firm once - never again. 

It is really nice though, to just have something to enjoy for a few minutes, that is only available when the weather is teetering on the edge of too hot. That is symbolic of the best that the season has to offer.

What could be more sublime, after all, than that stray drip of mango nectar dripping off your chin? Than slicing each cheek into cubes and inverting them, for bite-size chunks ready to eat? The messiness, the sweetness, the satisfaction as it settles into the pit of your stomach reassuring you that all is delightfully well?

That mango was really good.

Choosing which void to shout into

Fascinating that this blog, untouched for years, can on its return to active posting still somehow find its way into 35 sets of eyeballs (theoretically*).

When I started this blog in 2009, I didn’t have any such analytics tools at my disposal to manage its performance. I can’t say for sure whether that might have impacted my approach. I have been thinking about that a whole lot lately.

Hasn't blogging changed in that time?

Humour my lament a moment; I miss the days where all my friends had their own blog, where I could go and I was completely in their space. The whole look curated to their tastes, every word exactly where they put it. Maybe an ad here or there if they were lucky enough to monetise, but it was like visiting them in their house. As has been widely documented, the advent of Social Media brought an end to that, and now we can't visit our friends at their own places anymore; we only see each other in online spaces that have been HIGHLY curated for us. Like only being allowed to see your friend at a café, and all the cafés look exactly the same. Also now every time you visit the café the menu has been ever-so-slightly adjusted, or put in a new place, or has disappeared altogether, and the little number placards on the table have become covered in so many ads they're spilling out onto the table top, and randoms from other tables keep coming over to join in your conversation, to the point where the table keeps getting bigger to allow more people to sit down, until the table is SO big you look around and realise you can't see your friends anymore. Even if you post, there's no guarantee that they'll see it, and vice versa. 

So here I am, back on my blogspot bullshit. It's nice and quiet here. Come in, have a cuppa.

*theoretically because there's no way to know if those 'eyeballs' were just scrapers or bots. Honestly, how can we even know?