bottledworder

It has been 13+ years now that this blog has lived with me. That’s a great number of days and months and years to be with something. Many relationships don’t last that long. 

Inscribing the daily, writing about writing or living with the past and the present in the same frame here has been fun.

A waste of time?

If a decade’s life is worth something, then in the great record books of life, when you have looked into the columns and figures of time and done the arithmetic and applied the formulas, all the reflections, the writing, the observations, the wandering words and picture trails of memory still come out as color coded ambivalence, perhaps highlighted to be copy-pasted into the could’ve-should’ve column or worse still, be tabulated as unnecessary wastage. 

In the final reckoning, the mouseover bubble still says product awaited.

Yet, it’s been a whole decade and more of growing up and growing old with a whole website full of debris of words (my own, of course, but also those of others). That’s been strangely comforting. To go back into the archives of self has been like opening the doors to a closet and being submerged in a wave of past selves, their words and their memories. 

Sometimes those selves have been recognizable, sometimes self has been submerged in an-other, yet forever connected. Sometimes the strings of connection between the past and present have been clear, sometimes the spark of recognition has been gone. Sometimes it’s been strange looking back at an older, younger self that could express wonder in unabashed ways or pen down cynicism with a sardonic panache that is unthinkable now. A decade later, that shawl’s been uncomfortable to don or has suffered from a loss of artistic edge.

Where has time gone?

If time is something limited, a certain number of minutes, days, years or decades allocated to us between the beginning and the inevitable end, it makes us contemplate what wastage is. If we are given a bucket of water, we only have a certain amount to drink, to wash our face with, to shower, to sprinkle on our plants or to just throw out. 

Some of us attempt to measure time by setting up milestones. Jobs, savings, weddings, kids, houses, bucket lists all get set up against this huge avalanche of oncoming time. Markers against which wastage can be measured or meaningfulness can be grasped. The record book of time attempts to chart this great chaos and places us on a map where time travels only in one direction. 

That record book is meant to be clasped as an amulet that might ward off some of the loss. We hope to live in the satisfaction that we have used what we could while we could. Then, in the records, we have something to show for all the sound and fury.

Until the tap runs dry and the water stops. We want to be ready. We don’t want to be caught with shampoo in our hair in a dry shower or watch the houseplant fade away with no water.

So you want to put down something like a book, an article, a paper or any other product with the definiteness of boundaries, something which in the olden days could be felt, held, shaped, touched, weighed and even smelt, or in the new electronic age can still have the boundedness of a full thing. Something that can be done and dusted.

A blog is not that. It’s not a thing like that. 

It grows with you, it changes, it contradicts itself, it stores momentary thoughts, it saves memories over time, it surprises itself. It lets the thoughts slip through your fingers, sometimes half-baked or half-remembered, just like life or time. It goes backwards and forwards as if time exists within its frame to be perceived differently. It exists in meaninglessness and chaos, just like our lives.

Despite all the record-keepings and the checks and the milestones and our desperate attempts to fill the right items in the right columns, unless what you make grows and survives, nay thrives in chaos, it has not lived.

To live is to leave a spotty trail for others. Let others take it where they will.