The Best Of My Blog In 2024
As I noted back in October, “there are exactly two days every year that like clockwork make me feel the weight of living”: my birthday, and New Year’s Day. For the past two years, at the end of this annual hellscape, I’ve published a sort of round-up offering my picks for what I find to be my best blog posts of the year ending. It’s a way of declaring both I Was Here and I Did This as I prepare to face down another 1st of January thinking, “Here we go again.”
In 2022, I’d written 73 posts and singled out ten. In 2023, I’d written 323 posts and singled out a top two followed by another twenty-five. Here, then, of the 96 posts in 2024 are the twenty I feel are worth a year-ending shoutout, starting with my top two picks.
The top two
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“Shoplifters Of The World Unite”—My unabashed and unashamed paean to the most perfect movie no one’s ever seen about the need to be seen.
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“Today’s Considerable Portion”—Posting through a deep, existential despair on the occasion of another revolution around the sun.
The other eighteen
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“The Year For Blogging To Pump Up The Volume”—My ode to Mark Hunter’s exhortation to “seize the air” and the voices that did so.
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“Sleepwalking In Place”—An insomnia-fueled look back at the days when I could and did travel, prompted by a book by Kij Johnson.
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“The Proper Diagnosis”—A short digression to explain that “the pathologies of neoliberal capitalism hurt people rated as not having any value”.
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“Travels With”—Continuing to explore my stymied wanderlust by cataloguing more of the various places I’ve actually gotten to experience.
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“On Digital Relationships: Once Upon A Time, I Was A Voxer”—My entry to an Indieweb Carnival month “on digital relationships” about how I learned to be online.
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“From Alaska To Bajor In Search Of Identity”—Coincidence and dreams in a look at identity through Northern Exposure and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
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“The Body Shaming Of Liberals”—The most important thing about your small dick jokes is that they make you a small person.
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“And Then There Were Ten”—Something of a short obituary of yet another of The Belmont Goats, and about the need for some things to be transitory.
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“I’m Livin’ On Baby Food”—Soul Coughing somehow reunited for a tour, and somehow the resource management issues that come with chronic fatigue let me go.
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“Meet Your Muppet Archetypes”—How a light-hearted internet meme might just be a decent exercise for your next therapy session.
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“(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Patience and Understanding”—On how policing disability (claims) mostly just damages disabled people and makes you an asshole.
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“The Music Of The Spheres”—The blogosphere didn’t end, if only because there’s never only just been whatever you think of as the one blogosphere anyway.
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“Our Blogger’s Voice”—A brief history of the RCA mascot via memory lane to Albany, New York, as a way to hear one particular blogger’s lament.
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“Fighting From Afar”—A dreams sends me researching a word that turns out to be a name and thinking about existing “far from life”.
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“Leaving Out The Important Questions On Autism Research”—The perennial question of why research surveys about autism leave out the important questions.
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“On Impact: The Big Win”—My entry to an Indieweb Carnival month “on impact” interrogates the tension between blogging life and agreeing with Franny Glass on the matter of “ego, ego ego”.
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“Hope And Despair”—Confronting as best I can that this year the hellscape includes a disastrous election and a fascist inauguration.
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“Aphantasia And Trauma Redux”—A return to the well of the mind’s eye and its lack, and how it impacts the laying down of chronic stress in the brain.
It’s a lot, singling out twenty posts from a population of just ninety-six. I struggled with this cull, and struggled with the idea that it should be followed by a second. It seems too high a proportion.
In the end, though, this is my blog.
In the end, too, this became a year in which the deep, existential despair of its final months seemed especially acute, and especially of note, in a way that (Franny Glass notwithstanding) makes acute as well my need to declare that I Was Here and I Did This before we all go to bed tonight just to get up again tomorrow to repeat the entire frustrating exercise.