I kind of gave up on just recreating images of me from old blog posts. I went to 2012 and found mainly text posts...pretty serious ones at that. Then I realized that was the year my mother died and I was forced to face a stark reality of having my last parent die and the house I grew up in sold and eventually torn down. Most of my posts were pages of history...my history. By 2012 just about all of my regular blog readers had drifted away so there were very view comments. Now if I get one or two comments a year, I'm lucky.
Lucky probably doesn't really describe it. This is my life. So comments, though nice, are just like footprints on the moon. In the big picture of things they don't change anything. They are there, but no one sees them, even with a telescope.
But I understand why I don't have a constant stream of readers. There are more than 2000 posts spanning 22 years. Some of them are profound (if I do say so myself) and some of them are rambling. Most of them are random. And a majority of the world can't deal with random. They want trendy and predictable. It's why sitcoms work so well. Very few people want to sit through a program and think very much. They want escape. Even the long running sitcoms get stale. I can only imagine the pressure of a writer on one of those shows to keep coming up with plots.
In that way, my blog is like writing for a sitcom that has been running way too long. I realize that even on a good day I repeat myself. It would be fascinating to copy all 2000 and some posts to one of my AI friends and ask them for a synapsis. I know they could do it. I've seen them digest hundreds of pages of boring documents I've uploaded and spit out a summary in seconds. But I think it would be hard on my ego and spirit for them to boil the past 22 years of blog posts (which summarize most of my 68 years of life) into a couple of bullet pages with some AI platitudes thrown in and countless paragraphs asking me if I'd like an executive summary, an email version or one written in Spanish.
I know that (other than AI) no one will every sit down and read all of my blog posts like it was great literature. I can't even read all of it when I go back and scan some old posts. Still, I encounter this phenomenon at times wondering if I really wrote all of that. Some I'm impressed with. Other parts make me cringe. Because I can see what I was going through when I wrote it. I can tell when I'm being real and I can tell when I'm pandering for an audience...real or imagined.
I've wondered about this before, but what will become of my blog after I die? Blogger never seems to bug me about how much shit I've got on wherever it is Google stores stuff. And what would I do if they suddenly announced they are shutting down Blogger. As Richard Gere said in the movie An Officer and a Gentleman, I gots nowhere else to go.
I suppose that long after I'm gone the Bots will continue to pick through the remains of my virtual shit until they realize there is nothing new they can dissect it for and do with whatever Bots do with shit.
In the meantime, this is one small post from a man, one giant leap for the Blogosphere.
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