I did something today I haven’t done in eons — I cleaned up my blog roll. It was a rather sad housecleaning that I had put off for quite some time.
When I started blogging over five years ago, Facebook and Twitter weren’t even on the horizon. I lived in Santa Fe – a small town where my choice of gay friends was small. At the time, I used blogging as a way to connect with other gays in other cities and made some wonderful friends in the process. We traveled to each others’ homes, shared insights and strengthened friendships through commenting and also ran into a number of imposters who presented themselves as people they weren’t. The drama. The drama.
I moved back to San Francisco in 2006 and for the first time found myself surrounded by queers. I made new friends, built new relationships, changed jobs and took on new opportunities. I now mainly converse with people over Facebook and Twitter. My blog is interconnected with these new communication media. Rather quickly, my world became much smaller on the net. I easily reconnected with elementary school pals, college roommates and random hook-ups. Many of my blogger friends have transitioned over to these channels and left their blogs to rust. As I was cleaning up my blog list, it was difficult to remove Adam’s This Boy Elroy, Darin’s All Prep and No H, Atari’s three blogs, The Jimmi Chronicles and many others. We all now connect through Facebook, Twitter or other faster methods where we can update in a few sentences.
A few of us remain: BrettCajun, Spo, Spirit of St. Louis, Homer, Moby and Nathan. But for me (for the most part), the connections and comments are gone. I head to Facebook to see what my gays are up to.
I sat down with my therapist today and interestingly enough, my blogging came up. Over five years, this blog has become a personal journal of experiences and observations that I would be challenged to replicate anywhere else. My readership is almost non-existent than it was in 2005-06, but I have no intention of going anywhere. I told my therapist that when I go back to re-read my blog entries over five years, I can see all my ups and downs, relationships, mistakes, successes — basically, my life on a daily basis. So what if no one comes by DanNation anymore? Maybe this blog will be a testament to my existence if I were hit by a bus tomorrow or a guide to a mid-30something closeted gay coming out of the closet. Who knows?
And I could never had said all this in 140 characters or less…
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