For the first time in ages I've reviewed my old entries here and have remembered how engaged with blogging I was back then.
A number of things have happened since 2006, but I don't remember why I stopped making entries. Writing requires a concentrated effort, obviously, and maybe my attention has become too diffused. What was it that happened in 2006 that might have scattered my focus? I'm not sure, but in August of that year I was diagnosed with a heart problem that was serious enough to require open heart surgery. Was that it? I have no idea, and anyway, reasons are important but in the end they don't matter as much as the effects they produce in our lives. (Or is that just the current therapeutic trend?)
But maybe there's a clue after all. Looking at my old blog entries and discovering the changes in the Blogger system, I find some unpublished drafts written back then, one of which goes like this:
It was a dark and stormy night. I was eating cheese and thinking of changing the name of this blog to Choking the Bishop ...but then I thought, Why bother? because it's really just more of the same old bullshit was a dark and stormy night. We were sitting around the campfire when it occurred to me that this blog is the final refuge of my dreams, and what I need to do is get up and leave this dark and stormy night behind.I'm guessing I wrote that sometime after the surgery when I hit a wall of severe depression that might have been accompanied by a failure of confidence and imagination.
But what's this, a self-obsessed Facebook diary?
Ok, so I became slightly addicted to 1st person perspective (albeit with a certain necessary narrative distance) because it somehow allowed me to feel as though I actually existed in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, but now we're getting into murky territory. I've spent a good percentage of my life in that country and I'm comfortable there, but this blog is not True Confessions and such raw personal narration is not my thing.
Meanwhile, another old unpublished entry, about the building I live in, also caught my eye. Something about the feeling it expressed about my relations with children took me back a decade to the way things were in those days.
Since I wrote that entry, the character of the building has changed quite a bit. When prices in this part of the city started rocketing upwards as part of the "Brooklyn renaissance" that accelerated the process of gentrification, old residents took advantage of the opportunity to make a killing and sold out to wealthier buyers in the familiar pattern that's quickly reinforced and enhanced by the big realtors like Corcoran, Coldwell Banker, Century 21, etc.
The new population of residents includes a significant percentage of very wealthy people who regard older residents like me as lower class. We seem to have crossed the threshold beyond which Veblen's concept of "conspicuous consumption" predominates. Below that line of demarcation, it's hard to tell who's richer than whom because having money is considered embarrassing and is therefore hidden behind an 'everyman' style of presentation that includes cargo pants, running shoes and baseball caps.
Beyond that boundary, such self-deprecating restraint is overwhelmed by the opportunity to follow the fashions in glossy display ads that feature whatever the merchandise is wearing this year. The difference is sudden and sharp, almost like the phase change where water turns to ice at precisely 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
I just published that old entry STET, only changing the title to 'Gated' because it describes the character of an earlier condition of exclusivity and privilege. Now I will submit this one to the scrutiny of one or two readers who stumble in here looking for an elephant, and then there's a wacky number from my remodeling days...
