A symptom of nostalgia and the possibility of renewal
There is something kind of eerie about how even now my brain slides effortlessly into this familiar state when I begin to write. I've been neglecting my writing for years at this point--a fact I'm loathe to admit--but on some level I don't think it's a skill that can ever fully abandon me. My prose is clunkier than it used to be, sure, a little less exacting, perhaps, but as with any muscle I intend to strengthen it through repeated use. Even the voice I find myself using here doesn't feel quite right, but again, finding it through repetition.
I really hemmed and hawed over the initial blog fields before hitting Publish. I know they're easily changed, but I needed something that felt, I dunno, appropriate? I couldn't just throw in a completely arbitrary placeholder. Anyway, I've been feeling a little nostalgic and I think this blog is partially a symptom of that. The last time I kept a blog like this I was in college and I would relentlessly use references to things I liked as titles, so I thought I'd pay homage to that practice. The url is a line from a song by The Bird and The Bee that I used in that now long-since deleted blog, and the title itself is a reference to the opening chapter of one of my favorite books The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall: "A relic of something nine-tenths collapsed." Like I said, I'm going for something thematically appropriate.
On some level it seems a little self-indulgent to kick things off with a rumination on my own nostalgia for my misspent youth (in stark contrast to my misspent adulthood [the more things change, am I right?]) but who am I kidding? A blog itself is an exercise in self-indulgence, so best to lean in. I don't intend for this whole experiment to be about living in my past. I want to start this off by thinking about what I miss about myself from that time, salvaging the good stuff, and carrying it into the future. I already know what I want to post about next. After that, I'll try to organically decide what this becomes, but I'm feeling cautiously optimistic about the whole thing.