2024s
Unexpected Song
Listening to musicals still makes me sad sometimes. Especially some musicals, and especially some times. It’s been nearly twenty years since that part of my life. I never fully closed the door to that part of me, but it’s also a room I can’t go into completely. It’s a room I don’t think I’ll ever fully inhabit again. And yet.
Shelves of scripts I’ll never give away. Soundtracks moved from device to device that I can’t listen to anymore. Boxes of programs and cast party souvenirs in the attic.
It’s cliche to say this, but it was a lifetime ago. I think back to that period and it’s not unfamiliar but it is foreign. Like walking through your childhood home and realizing you aren’t in a memory but in a dream that’s slowly melting into a nightmare.
But the nightmare isn’t now, it was back then, when I violently ripped out that page from my life and tossed it to the wind. Only later realizing there were words on the page I’d never see again, never stumble across and only sometimes be able to remember the vague shapes of. Words that were so important to me not just lost but discarded. A secret formula, a spell, a code, a key. Gone.
At the time, I thought my love of theatre defined me. I couldn’t imagine myself or my life without that as the foundation. What does that mean now, for the things I see around me that I cling to? The stuff I surround myself with that I hang my identity on?
Maybe its encouraging, empowering even. That part of my life is gone, and yet I remain. Completely different and exactly the same.
There was so much more violently lost back then than just my connection to the stage. So much more pain caused and endured. And yet most of those scars have healed over and I am stronger for it. Leaner. Smarter.
But there was such potential then. I was just starting something, intoxicated with the potential of it all, and I drunkenly wrapped my life around a lamp post. The wounds healed. Relationships irrevocably lost, but hearts grew back. I am better for that time in my life. Much didn’t survive the transition. Much did and is stronger as a result. But in between, or maybe holding it all together is… theatre. That life of mine, just getting started, never to resolve.
Hanging in the air. A ghost light on stage waiting for the next show that will never come. But at least the theater is never truly dark.
This melancholia brought to you by:
Journal Excerpt
…wandering forward, sometimes only by inches. But I am moving. And so is everything else. I will never truly get to pause everything and have a proper look around to get my bearings. But I can keep dropping pages like breadcrumbs as I go, and following the marks on the trunks of trees left before me, and keep chasing the sunlight I see streaming through the trees ahead.
And that will be enough.
From a journal entry dated 10 April 2024
morning computer 006
The Ever-Mutating Life of Tumblr Dot Com
Okay funny story - I wrote the below little post over a year ago, and for some reason, never published it. Instead it was hiding in drafts nearly lost to history and my memory.
Spoiler Alert: I did end up rejoining Tumblr, but then got back off of it around the change of the year as part of a general rejiggering of my internet/media/art-experiencing habits and routines. I do miss some aspects of Tumblr (again) but not enough to got back…
Anyway, original year-old post follows:
As a service, Tumblr’s lack of commerciality and consistent inability to successfully monetize itself is part of its whole appeal. There’s a whole genre of Tumblr posts that just screenshot and mock the bizarre hosted ads that spawn on the dashboard like mutated fish in a radioactively-poisoned river.
But it’s a loving kind of mockery—users seem, for the most part, to be genuinely grateful for the state of the site. For many, it’s a refuge from the dystopian insanity that the rest of the internet has come to represent. “It’s like anti-social social media,” says Bec, regarding Tumblr’s continued paradoxical appeal.
[…] for those who value creativity without the pressures of “hustle culture,” and wish to avoid the current-events performative outrage that has crept in, kudzu-like, and swallowed up almost every single other area of open expression online, Tumblr remains ideal.
The corollary of that, of course, being that those who appreciate that creativity without necessarily needing or wanting to express it themselves can also find happy homes on Tumblr, as spectators to a healthy culture of simply liking things.
Source: The Ever Mutating Life of Tumblr dot com
Tumblr was absolutely my social media “home” for a long time - though I never saw it has a social media platform, per se. It was communal blogging and celebration of cool shit. It was the only platform I ever amassed any sort of following on, and the only one I ever saw my self wanting a following on.
I deleted my account and my tumblogs (hell yes, that is what I did and will aways call them) when the porn ban came down - mainly because the site/admins/corporate overlords were handling it, oh so badly. But it sounds like a lot of that has calmed down now…
And now, I’m nostalgic for it? I am feeling… things? This will not do, not at all.
I’m not considering getting back on Tumblr? …am I?
Oh no.
I am afraid to put dates on entries.
I am intimidated. I feel pressured by them.
I understand and agree with their usefulness in the world of ‘blog as archive’, but among the other parallel worlds of what a blog can be, I kind of like the ambiguity of posting without them. Does it really matter that you know exactly what day I said this? Or, how close this is, temporally, to the previous post? To the (hopefully) next one?
I mean, it might matter! I don’t actually know! I’m asking you!
Undecided. Is there a date on this post? Depending on when you are looking at it, there might be. Or there might not. I’m not sure if there is a third option.
“The only one among us not free to change their mind is the one who does not decide…”