Shadows of the Past

It has been one year since this blog began, one year since we began this experiment in interaction. Since then things have changed. We are different people, shaped by the irrevocable flow of time. That difference has seeped through into our blogs, our topics, our voice, our presence has changed. My goals now for this endeavor are humbler--while this will always be a way for the three of us separated by time and space and life to keep in touch, to keep the bigger questions which do not always fit into the too infrequent catch-up phone calls in focus, no longer do I see it as a forum where what we shout to each other will affect the intervening distances. Sometime I do not even think that I am having a conversation with you let alone a dialogue with the world beyond. This experiment has been proof that the interweb is too impersonal, too big, too cold, too technological for a real debate. That is not why people turn to the on-line world--it is largely for escapism, for voyeurism, for socially acceptable stalking, for a chance to scream their opinions into the void, and often for a dose of schadenfreude. A genuine dialogue, developing in the void between strangers for no other purpose than to share each others thoughts has eluded us, and may be impossible in this medium.

While this experiment has failed I am not now tempted to take down this blog as I once was. For I have found a new purpose in it--a repository. It is a place where I can fix my thoughts, both in a effort to sort them out and as a record for me as to what issues I was concerned with and what I thought in the past, a diary or letter opened to our little public. It is a place for me to put poems, pictures and mostly quotes that inspire and amuse me. And through this sharing a new dialogue might occur, one less structured and less deliberate than the previous goal, but one occurring through the creation of a shared consciousness. By creating such a trove we at least create a common store of idea, of language and reference from which the dialogue can stem.

So two our 2 readers and anyone else out there who stumbles upon us, I have a favor to ask for our one year anniversary. Please, talk, think, point out something else that relates to what we are saying--respond in someway so we are not just shouting into the void.