Little Earthquakes

We designed and now run a major blog directory for a client and part of the maintenance and upkeep involves going through every single one of the 7,000+ current listings by hand and removing bad links, abandoned blogs and the like. Thank goodness for Hamid's code - at least the 404s have been removed from the database already...even so, it's a big job going through the world's diatribes this way, has to be done though.

I spend hours clicking links, scanning blog pages, and making reports for edits, link moves, and flat-out deletes...until my eyes glaze over with the boredom of it all. But in the middle of this monotony there's a little sadness whenever I come across a blog that's been totally left to rot for the past few months...it was clearly submitted with the best of intentions but somewhere along the line the author just...gave up. No more lofty goals of publishing one's life, thoughts, and opinions to the web on a regular basis, consistent communication with the rest of humanity via this most inhuman format, forever.

I don't think anyone ever starts a blog knowing full well they're going to one day abandon the project completely; their online persona left without a drop of attention, like dusty dried-up plants in a hallway somewhere no one cares. I don't know anyone who starts something with the intention of unfinished business. At the same time, and in all fairness, a blog is by it's very nature a volatile and needy creature and it can at times begin to feel like an annoying requirement; striving to keep the distance between date stamps as short as possible. And the ridiculous guilt that creeps in for having not posted for days, or weeks....or months until finally the very thought of it leaves one inventing a million ways to frame and phrase a graceful exit in hopes of finding the one that makes the most sense. These half-penned blogs - the ones that actually make a point of being done with a proper adieu...at least they provide some closure. It's the ones that just fall off into the nothing of the net with increasingly sporadic posts and an eventual, obvious silence that break my heart.

I came across one the other day that survived only long enough to mourn the loss of a marriage. A man crying openly into web space over his divorce, over a woman who no longer loved him enough to wait for whatever it was she needed. He wrote that her eyes had changed. He wrote that he knew he had not done enough to keep her happy, that he knew he had not spent enough time getting to know the her she was becoming as she grew and changed and evolved. By the time he started writing, it was too late. It was already over and she was standing in the doorway with the eyes he didn't recognize and that was that. He worked out his demons for a few more posts; alternating between hopeful and hateful until his friends finally came over to drag him out to a baseball game. And that was the last post - there was nothing more to tell me what had happened to the man, or to his wife. If they'd stayed friends, worked out their differences...if he'd truly made it out of the depression he mentioned. I felt cheated by this story of a stranger's life - half assed and as incomplete as any book with pages ripped out.

Not every one of these abandoned blogs has a trauma in it's virtual pages - but their emptiness, their failure reminds me that if I don't start worrying about the space between date stamps I'm going to have to delete my own link. Fortunately, it'll be months before I get to Personal Blogs ----> People and Society.