Rodent Regatta

Paul Ford has captured what every person I’ve ever known has felt with Until the Water Boils. Dean Allen amplified it. This is well-written material. In addition to evoking emotion, it inspires one to write.

Just look at this excerpt from Dean’s reflection:

In my experience (I have no one elses) the worst of the torment of a bitter end usually came not from feelings of rejection or invalidation or loss though those piled up like hills and mountains but rather from things I heard myself saying. Yes asshole, that was you put that together, arent you proud. Turn it around in your head for years, pretend the words meant something else, that somehow they landed on gracious and forgiving ears, but you cant get them back. Ever. Lets paraphrase a dead French male: we can forgive those whove hurt us, but not those we hurt.

Love will do that to you. The loss of love will, too. Having read these entries this morning, I’m going to make certain I add more of this sort of fiber to my weblog-reading diet. There are clever designers in the weblog world. There are clever coders. Most importantly, there are some excellent writers. I want to learn from the best of all of them.

My earliest writing in a weblog was awful. It was about trying to learn how to use a weblog and HTML and stuff. Because it was my first writing, I wanted to save it. Maybe it’s in an ugly form right now, but it’s now in a single continuous stream of entries. I got it all together over the weekend.

With that done, I’m committing to several new efforts here. First, I want to read more great weblogs. Second, I want to gain some depth in my knowledge of HTML. Third, I want to make a certain set of tools for doing this sort work uniquely mine. Movable Type and its offspring will be one. NoteTab Pro may be one. TopStyle might become one. I want to get familiar with validation of HTML variants, CSS and RSS and the like.

I plan to start this reawakening with weblogs like Paul’s and Dean’s and Shirley Kaiser’s. I’m glad I found their work. I’m glad I got my weblog entries reunited. I’m glad it’s May of 2003 and I’m able to take this next fork in the road.