So – my big background project right now is the movement of the tour Journal from the hand-coded behemoth that it’s been for the past 14 years over to WordPress. I THINK it’s a good idea? It’s not as beautiful, but it’s a LOT more flexible, and means that as people’s screens get bigger and bigger the Journal won’t have to go through massive revisions every couple of years… it’s searchable this way, I can upload larger photographs… whatever. There’s any number of reasons why I hope it’s a good idea.
But it’s not a book anymore. It’s a blog. And part of me is sad about that. Of course, the “book” format is modeled after something I haven’t done in a long, long, long time. After a horrible incident where someone literally destroyed my previous 10 years of physical Journals, the actual Little Black Books on which the Journal had been based just lost all momentum. I look at the two I have left (the other dozen or so gone forever) and they’re such wonderful OBJECTS, and I do sort of wish I could go back to them, but all the stutter stop of writing in physical books just goes nowhere…
And so the archetype, the reason for the tradition of the Journal is gone. The Journal itself has become physically unwieldy, and as it was coming up to the time for me to make another massive template change (because the fonts just aren’t lining up anymore, no, I don’t know why) I’m simply sick of relearning how to do this THING every couple of years… only to know the next changeup will only be a couple more years away.
And so I’ve embarked on transferring it. It’s over 4000 pages and who knows how many entries. I’ve committed myself to transferring at least five entries a day and I’ve reached December 28th, 2003 [some things that I don’t understand about WordPress… why for art thou a motherfucking SUBSCRIPT not SUPERSCRIPT? I’m not figuring out how to fix these right now… but what the Hell??!?!] (Today is Heather’s brother’s birthday!!!). I’m not really reading (though an editorial pass wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, adding keywords and stuff like that as well… but it’s just so MUCH) but the pictures are strong enough. Pictures in which everyone now is dead. Pictures of people that are gone and married or vanished or … who knows… Celebrating Justin’s 17th birthday. It’s a slap in the face as the passage of time is pressed hard into me and combined with catching fragments of news, moments of time that step outside of my tiny little world that I was writing about (especially in the early years, there’s not much other than “we went here and met this person”) compared to the headlines of today… it all just makes me feel brutally old.
