Recollections of Writing

I spent the better part of the day yesterday reading posts from an old blog I had been able to restore from a backup file. Either I’d forgotten I’d created the backup or had tried to restore it unsuccessfully in the past and had given up. Yesterday, though, I was able to recover it.

I started the blog in July 2005 and abandoned it in August 2008, writing 1,152 posts during that time.  Almost no one read the blog, which is what led me, at least in part, to give it up. Returning to it yesterday, I am glad it didn’t have much of an audience. I wrote a large percentage of the posts as political diatribes, my abundant loathing of George Bush in full view and my nascent conclusion that only revolution could cure the ills he wrought informing many of my rants.  Much of the unvarnished rage I wrote was awash with vulgarities flung at whatever was the subject of my discontent. I regularly excoriated politics, religion, materialism, and myself. I’d like to think the rage has cooled considerably since then, though the molten heat of my emotions still gets the better of me from time to time. Some of what I wrote deserves to be expunged from the historical record; I was guilty of some pretty lousy writing when I let my temper control the keyboard.

Yet, I discovered yesterday, there are plenty of pearls hidden among the swine. I enjoyed reading about trips my wife and I took during those years. Tears welled up as I experienced, again, emotions I could write about then when they were so raw.

I discovered, too, that some of my writing was pretty damn good, though all of it would need a good, hard edit to make it worthy of publication.  I also found that some of what I wrote during those three years has found its way into things I’ve written since. Apparently, I had saved Word files of some of my posts and used them, subsequently, to write posts for this and a couple of my other blogs that are still viewable. I rarely visit the others and I post to them even less frequently.

The best part of successfully restoring the old blog, though, is that it gives me plenty of material to work with in creating a compilation of stories and essays that I might combine with more recent writing to compile a publishable “mass.” It’s going to be a lot of work, but may be worth it, at least to me. I find it easier to thumb through a book than to dig through old blog posts.

About John Swinburn

"Love not what you are but what you may become."― Miguel de Cervantes
This entry was posted in Memories, Politics, Rant, Writing. Bookmark the permalink.

2 Responses to Recollections of Writing

  1. Yes, indeed, that’s what I’m referring to.

  2. Teresa says:

    are you referring to Myopia?

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