It’s back! Risen from the coffin and shaking off that grave dirt, the horror-movie-style silhouette stumbles along against the moonlight…

Ok, maybe I’m being melodramatic. Suffice it to say, bluntly, that it’s been more than a year since my last post. I think my journal competes with the blog, especially when time is limited. Still, they’re different mediums. Here, there’s an audience (such as it is). In my journal, I’m writing to my future self, and that changes what I focus on and how I write.

But ideally, since the journal and the blog are different mediums and serve different purposes, I would write for both.

And writing in general is something I want to be more intentional about.

For one, it keeps me sane. Life in modern America is fast-pasted and complex. When I don’t write I can lose track of a coherent and organizing narrative for my life. When I do write, I can live more thoughtfully and intentionally. I can discern the topography of days.

Writing also helps me think. I can put the thoughts down, store them more easily than in my memory, return to them, revise them. Share them across time and distance. This is not to degrade the spoken word, with its irreplaceable qualities of emotion and tone, or memory, which I think is overly neglected in our writing centered society. Writing is an invention, and like others it shapes us, for better and worse. In this case I think part of the better is that it helps us cope with the flood of information we’re confronted with today, which is too much for memory alone. Of course, it’s also what enables that flood of information in the first place. But this is what we live with.

In that context, part of me welcomes the simplicity of not spending much time on the internet. It can be an addiction, narcissistic escapism, and in general consuming. I usually am online longer than planned, and I hate the dull feeling I have afterward, knowing I have killed hours of time. When I could have done something productive and physical, like going for a walk, cooking, drawing, gardening. But it is not a simple real is good and virtual is bad. The virtual is real, as real as the words I speak and the newspaper and the chessboard and photograph.

If I’m right about that, our choices of action in the virtual world are as important as the choices we make about what actions to take in the real world. And thus values matter. What am I living for? I can play mindless games. I can look at porn. Or I can write a message to the friend I haven’t talked to in a month, asking them how they’re doing. And I can bring this blog back to life. I can seek to live my life reflectively and not just drifting along.

So I’m bringing the blog back, zombie-esque as it is. Because, by nature and nurture, I’m a writer. I’m more alive and whole when I write, and having a blog encourages that. Because I want to organize and share my thoughts on life. Because if I’m going to get stuck on the Internet, I’d rather do this than stalk acquaintances on Facebook, watch movie trailers on apple.com, or play some flash game.

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