Anni Get Your Versary

In the natural course of things, one is occasionally offered the luxury of retrospect, which, depending on the circumstance — curious pride and the throes of disillusionment, respectively as follows —, will either lead to a renewed vigour in present tasks or a stultifying nostalgia for past ones. On such occasions it is important to maintain a veneer of abject objectivity, if one is to benefit from the activity, and it was with this in mind that I took to the archives to assess the journey thus far, something which, I hoped, would act as much-needed adrenalin for Phase Two.

What struck me most prominently during the delve was not, as might be expected, the sediment (the dirty stuff) or similar such juvenelia, but the sentiment. Not the wellreadiment (the qwerty stuff), not the whathesaidiment (the flirty stuff), not even the dropdeadiment (the shirty stuff). No — the sentiment. The véritable; the Dear reader, hear my heart...; the tap, tap, tap of my tears; the hhonest to ghod; the All That is Good and Proper. The point, some might say. Now, I'm not one to shoo or shy from sentiment on principle, nor do I mind, on occasion, exposing the ugly underneath, but I have found that sentiment, when expressed rawly, can sometimes bind a piece so firmly to a place and a time and a feeling that divorcing it from its context and appreciating what it has to offer is nigh on impossible, particularly as its impetus and audience drift further apart. Moreover, it often erodes ration, although admittedly that isn't always a bad thing. Take the following, from August 8th, 2006:

Tuesday. Big day. I hate people.

What are we to make of that? Nothing. It's perfunctory to the point where only its author could ever find anything of value in it, and even then he'd have to squint. It adds nothing, it gives nothing, you get nothing. It's an event horizon of callow vanity, the kind of treacle that gives literacy a bad name. Now compare it to this slight retraction posted two days later:

Errsday. I made the mistake of gibletting my ego, ergo my soul. Now I just hate myself.

While we still have the unfortunate voicing of an unfortunate sentiment, we now have a sense of craft, even humour, to fall back on, ensuring that audience pleasure is at least a possibility, if only a slight one. But it was to be a while yet before I reached the level of this decidedly unsentimental nugget from February 23rd, 2007 (the day ain't even mentioned!):

Blustered down from generation to generation in bold, steady bumps, Valentino fascism, as I've dubbed it, has inherited from the old world a certain, or rather uncertain, capricious nature which initially seems at odds with the very notion of lineage tradition, but is in fact a reflection of the underlying instability inherent in all forms of fascism, indeed the very thing which accounts for its formidable, and frankly frightening, adaptability. It almost put me off my cereal, I'll tell you.

From then on the road began to smooth out. I eased into a rhythm and found my feet, dancing steadily ever since. But those glaring stains continued (and continue) to haunt me. What could I do — delete them? No. This is a document. The assets of this medium are its rawness and immediacy — process laid bare. I considered erecting stern condemnation notices on the offending posts, but again that would be betraying the form. After all, this is not the place for discipline, or at any rate it doesn't have to be. The flaws are but facets of the whole, and often the whole is the better for it. Let us not bemoan sinking standards or, God help us, lapses of talent: they are the wasted posts, writ with a hand on the keyboard and an eye on the mirror. Let us instead bound ungracefully forward, arse-first but not looking back, and plant our fallible faces on history's asphalt. Not for the press, not for the prestige, not for the presence, but for the sheer oxen pleasure of articulation itself. It may prove the promulgation of nothing in particular, but that nothing in particular will be our nothing in particular; nay, that nothing in particular will be us.

No. It's less than that. But it sure as hell beats WoW.