Hello, everyone! I haven’t used this space for any blogging recently. Okay, maybe I’m not entirely sure what blogging is. I used to use the blog posts to detail in excruciating detail things that had happened to me. Every time I moved house, started a new job, fell ill, tinkered with a project — it all went here. Every time I had a weird dream, here it was. Every time a crazy person harassed me in the street, I wrote about it. That’s happened a surprisingly large number of times.
Instead I’ve posted essays, movie and game reviews but I haven’t written a great deal about what’s going on in my life, what I’ve been up to. Let’s remedy that.
Okay, so I’ve been working on making some changes to the website. A tweak here, an adjustment there. It starts off as an idle fancy: “You know, I really should fix that.” At first you ignore it, then it boomerangs back and hits you in the jugular. Then you tinker, then you rebuild, then you overhaul. Before you know it your website is strewn over the living room carpet in tiny pieces and you need put it back together but with a Twitter feed in it, somehow. And each one of these widgets and divs and doodads has to have its own little picture, which individually don’t take long to draw but multiplied by twenty take longer than you’d think.
Part of this website overhaul process has involved going back and re-reading past blog posts. Not an entirely comfortable experience, I’ll admit. I don’t remember them being quite that bad, which sort of makes me relieved that nobody read them. In places pretentious, in others absurd, occasionally petty, often apologetic for shortcomings. I was struck by how achingly insincere they all are. I can’t read them without seeing a young man desperate to project an image of someone different to who he really is. Sometimes I would puff myself up and pretend to be bigger than I am, sometimes I would make sarcastic (and quite impolite) comments about my pitifully small readership. Sometimes I would pretend to be meaner than I really was, proudly wearing the mantle of ‘belligerent asshole single-handedly setting the world to rights’ even when it didn’t quite fit. I’m not a warrior. I have been, and will always remain, a lover and not a fighter.
Just as I pulled apart and overhauled my website, I have also pulled apart and overhauled myself. As embarrassing as those old blog posts were to re-read I derived a great deal of comfort from knowing that the young man who wrote them is not me. I know him well, we have a lot in common but he and I are not the same person. I’m the man he would have wanted to be if he’d even had the good sense to know what kind of man he wanted to be.
Nevertheless, no matter how crappy his blog posts were, that young man made some damn fine comic strips and I’m still immeasurably proud of the body of work we’ve collaborated on.
Out with the old and in with the new, as they say! What’s new? May is the last full month I will spend as an unmarried man. That’s new! Early next month I’m tying the knot. I’m not scared, but I do find the idea daunting. This whole getting married deal is a big one, as deals go, and nobody seems to acknowledge that. Have you ever played a game, read a book or watched something where magic was commonplace? People can open portals to other places, drink magic potions, turn each other into animals, fly, become invisible and summon creatures but nobody cares. Nobody loses their shit when they see somebody teleport — a thousand miracles happen every day and nobody cares, they take it for granted just as we take for granted portable GPS devices and wireless internet connections. That’s kind of how I see marriage. The words ‘husband’, ‘wife’, ‘family’: these are ancient, powerful words. They have a poetry to them, a magic even. It’s one thing to move in with someone and never move out, it’s another thing altogether to be someone’s husband.
Sure is going to be fun, though.
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