Fifteen Years

I’M SHOCKED TO REALIZE that I’ve been maintaining this blog for fifteen years (not to the day, but close). Its original purpose was to help me get work, because I allowed me to point editors (or whomever) to stuff I’d written in order to back up my claims of being able to write fairly well.

Although I began ambitiously posting a piece per day, taking Saturdays off, so to speak, by posting photos of mine, that ambition slackened over time. I cut down to two posts per week and now, one. It feels as if I’ve mined everything in my files worth exhuming, although I know that there’s much, much more. Restaurant reviews alone seem endless, although they’re of lessening value as prices rise and eateries close. I dashed off any number of concert and theater advances – pieces to promote an upcoming event – which means that, unless there’s a compelling interview attached, those too have grown obsolete.

Looking over those early postings, which I dread, I see that it took a while to find my footing in this realm. I had thought of concentrating on food, given the thirty years I spent reviewing restaurants and my own phagomaniacal leanings, but I was dismayed to discover a plethora of food bloggers, each mirroring the last, each with a grinning self-portrait and chirrupy bio, each forcing you to slog through a megillah of adjective-laden crooning larded with photos of ingredients, procedures (don’t those sauté pans glisten?), and wondrous finished products before finally dropping you onto the recipe itself. I can’t compete with that level of self-promotion.

There’s also a large stack of concert and play reviews that I haven’t posted. Those that I do post usually are offered with the excuse that I wrote it some divisible-by-five number of years ago, which only reminds me how old I am. Although I’m attending very few events these days, dismayed by parking challenges and cell-phone-wielding morons, I remain quite good at sitting, and have no problem doing so while listening to some music or watching a movie. I gave up television programs back in the 1970s, when restaurant work kept me away from prime-time programming; after I moved to a job with more civilized hours, I discovered that prime-time (and really, now, any-time) TV programming is loud and formulaic, edited with fast cuts and shot with shaky cameras, no doubt to arrest the interest of those attention-span deficit cell-phone addicts.

Among my vintage pieces also are the articles I wrote for computer magazines in the early 1990s, when I thought I knew all there was to know about the PC world (and, in fact, I wrote for PC World, among others). Once I moved away from that world, it rocketed on past me. I successfully rebuilt a car engine in 1975; now I open the hood and am confronted with a complete mystery. That’s how it is with computers these days as well.

All of which underscores the fact that almost all of the writing I made money from was completely ephemeral. Those concerts are long over, the restaurants are shuttered, the books went out of print, and so on – and now that I’m doing so much less of it I’m all the more aware that my legacy is a puff of smoke. What remains are some words I tried to put in a coherent, pleasant-to-read order, so I’ll continue to dig out the old stuff and try to spit out some that’s new.