finding a Wednesday
Lately I’ve been at this crossroads. With writing and expressing. Creating things I enjoy and wish to get out there. It’s meant I have wanted change. Then something else. Like I wanted a different path next. Something that would let me write and publish and then do more differently.
I spent some months building this thing. I added stuff I wanted to it. I found this basic ownership thing which made the words feel better. More mine. I knew the last few days I’d do something. At the end of any day I have to feel good about writing. It’s a thing that makes my life more full. More interesting. Perhaps it gives me this sense of finding a life in Cambodia now and sharing just a little about how I find things. Life here is different yet not.
What I’ve needed is a place. A little shed over there on some corner of real estate. Somewhere between real and ideal. A place to hang my hat. To say things into some void where it has never mattered if you read. It is enough for the catharsis to say them.
Today I faced up to that. I realized what I was doing while it felt easier felt no better. I simply was not writing to make it all better. Not journaling to get my things out there. To face my morning still in bed with a pretense of words with no real meaning. Because lately I’ve felt life has none. I just have stopped I guess. Stopped here in Siem Reap at this crossroads of vercel, 11ty and GitHub. Here I find the little shack I exult in. Here I write for me. If you find it some Wednesday or another day that ends in Y good for you.
It’s enough to just say today and when I finish this tomorrow that I found a thing. I left another. It was a mistake. I went back to the place. The happy little space in some little corner of a web that I built. The feeling is immense.
I’m glad to be back. I may try again. Who knows. Right now this intersection seems worthy.
to be clear
The place I am at is not some amazing and complex work. I just built this thing from this howto. Then I started adding things to it I wanted. I figured out I wanted to embed different things like videos. I wanted to create a new collection of stuff called notes. I also added additional plugins and CSS and gave the blog a certain basic look I wanted. I never have wanted lots of slash pages or explanations of what I use, what I’m doing now, what things are under my desk. I figure for a few of them if you are reading this you have an idea about what I use and what I’m doing. Maybe there is no desk.
The little Frankenstein blog became this piece of things which I wanted to also use to learn more about how 11ty works. One of the primary things with it was creating a new collection. It is my view that this is one of the most significant and important things with 11ty. I had to learn how to do it so I did.
Finally, and I mentioned this before, its the whole ownership thing for me. I wanted to feel I created this thing and I owned it. I could take it away or I could get it back. I did do that. Thankfully GitHub maintains deleted repos for a period of time and I was able to get this back. I then took a backup of it using a git tool.
What it all means now is I have this little monster back. This thing which matters a great deal to me. It is not that some blogging platform doesn’t matter. I think they are all great. They all do for people. What I found for me is I wanted to be able to create a little bit of something, see how it works under there, and then use it.
So that’s basically what the Wednesday means. It took just a short time to get a thing back but the feeling was huge. From here on, perhaps I will think and then think twice about a change. It would be very easy to go use bearblog again. I could do that and feel right there. Living on some discovery algorithm. Maybe finding some sense of community or direction.
Instead what I found was a small voice. A feeling of the writing that somehow went away when I did go. And yeah… Here I am yelling at some void. I have things to say but I don’t really need you to read them. It is enough and more for me to say them.
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