Our Blogger’s Voice
Let’s try something else, in the form of a sort of “heard” directed at another blogger. Misu opens their latest with an observation:
Recently I’ve noticed that we have a lot of RCA Victor records. Each time I pull one out I find myself looking at the dog. His name is Nipper, apparently.
Indeed, that’s Nipper, and when I was younger my family semi-regularly used to drive directly beneath the largest Nipper in the world in Albany, NY.
Nipper is the largest of the four monumental terriers that once sat atop RTA’s distribution centers, and he’s the last dog to still exist on the building upon which he was originally installed. There were once enormous Nippers peering over the skylines of Chicago and Los Angeles, but those have since been demolished or removed.
[…]
Unlike his Baltimore lookalike, the Albany Nipper never had his head cocked to the bell of a gramophone. He has always been listening to the wind. Since the RTA facility closed its doors in the 1980s, affection for the oversized terrier has grown among local residents, who have adopted him as the city’s de facto mascot.
(See also the Albany History of History and Art and Roadside America for more.)
Indeed it turns out there’s an entire Capital District events calendar site called Nippertown, there was an art installation of lots of little Nippers to promote downtown Albany that then were auctioned for charity, and just three years ago the Times Union published a pictorial history, which includes a great if mildly unnerving shot from during construction, of Nipper’s disembodied head looking curiously at his own headless body.
Misu says in that same post:
What I hate most about reading my old entries from when I was healing is the self-pity that emanates from them. I can’t really pinpoint why I resent that feeling so much, why I’m so ashamed of it. Is it because I feel like I was just being dramatic? I know I wasn’t (but what does it really mean anyway to be dramatic, and why's it so bad?). Or maybe it’s because people go through the same things all the time without making nearly as a big fuss about them? Who knows. This time around I think subconsciously I’m trying to write in a way that future Misu wouldn’t be (as) ashamed of. I’m not sure if that’s good for me, if suppressing that self-pity might slow the healing or have other consequences.
I’m not going to get prescriptive here because everyone is different, but one of the things that happens when you move you’re blog around a lot too much, and a thing that’s exacerbated when you’re also restoring old blogging that fell offline, is that you’re revisiting a lot of old stuff.
(I’m not even to the real old stuff yet, having only just restored 2018 to present. Wait until I get to my blogging from twenty years ago.)
Maybe it’s in part because my memory issues create a constant, low-level derailment that keeps me from having a consistent sense of identity over time, but one of the reasons I want to get all this blogging back online is that it will serve as a representation of all those loosely-joined selves. I am now who I am now and I was then who I was then and if much or most of the latter is lost to the internal memory hole why not externalize that memory function a bit.
It’s hardly a secret that I don’t really hold back here. Just look at the long post of existential depression that marked my fifty-fifth birthday on Friday. That’s a brutally accurate depiction of what my birthdays are like for me, and why should I hide it just because either someone else will roll their eyes and judge (like my one-time Instagram bully) or I myself might someday look back and yikes at it (although that’s exceeding unlikely).
Anyway, as I say: everyone is different, but my vote almost always comes down on the side of being whole persons when it comes to what you blog. I don’t want a fine-tuned social performance, I want real humans, because the empathy engine is powered by people cocking their heads and listening to what you have to say.