One of my blogging buddies has quit blogging. His website is no more. I don’t know his specific reasons for quitting. But as a frequent visitor to his site, I’m sad to see him go and hope everything is okay in his neck of the woods. He lives in another part of the world than I do, across the Atlantic. Blogging is how I knew him, and now, it’s like losing a friend in ways.
I’m not suggesting there is anything wrong. Sometimes bloggers grow tired of writing on the web, of being on the web, and blogs die. I’ve been there myself a few times in the past. Nothing was the matter. I was just tired of writing into what often felt like the void. A touch jaded. It was that simple.
About a month ago, I noticed Mike had started removing much of his blog’s subpages. Only about a dozen essays remained on the homepage. I thought maybe he was just tinkering around. Stripping his site. Then perhaps redesigning it. Then, about two weeks ago, when I visited his blog, I was met with a 404 page with a short note that a website once existed here and perhaps another will pop up again some day, somewhere.
There was an image on the site that said something like, “Prepare for the collapse of society.”
I tried not to read too much into the text overlaid on the image. Mike didn’t overtly write about politics or world affairs. The image may have easily been dark humor. But if you’re anything like me, it’s hard not to feel like everything is going to hell in a hand basket. As a parent, while I know it may not be beneficial to worry about the future since I have no control over it, I do worry about my children’s future.
Humanity is on shaky ground and I can’t help but wonder what kind of dystopian hellscape we are leaving them to piece back together once we’re gone. Authoritarianism is sweeping the globe whether you want to admit it or not.
Maybe Mike did the most sane thing a person can do right now which is simply to unplug. If so, I applaud him for that. If I didn’t need the Internet for my job, maybe I would, too. I have in the past. You become like a ghost. Your reality is very different than everyone else’s. That’s true in ways simply by not being on social media — something I quit outright 10 years ago.
Granted, I was hoping Mike would change his mind and the 404 page would be replaced with his homepage again. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve almost pulled the plug on my own blog. Nor can I tell you how many times I did pull the plug on previous blogs. This domain is by no means my first. I’ve been writing online since the 1990s. The main reason I abandoned the blogroll that used to exist on my website a decade ago is because no one listed on it still blogs anymore. It was just a bunch of dead links.
Sometimes I feel like the lone survivor of an asteroid when social media took center stage and all the blogging dinosaurs were wiped out. There’s a newer generation of bloggers now; and for the most part, I feel like an outsider. I’m not in their clique of post replies and pingbacks. I’m not sure I even want to be. It often feels more like an extension of social media than it does personal blogging.
I have no way to get in touch with Mike nor do I know if he’s reading this. In the past, he linked to my site occasionally and I linked to his as well. I enjoyed his writing quite a bit and will miss it. He wrote long form essays on a variety of topics. I enjoy long form essays.
Long form writing feels like a lost art on personal blogs these days. I swear most personal blogs are 80% about blogging itself or the Internet or technology. Mike covered some of that. I do, too. But that wasn’t the bulk of his writing.
Admittedly, I don’t count many bloggers on the internet as my friends these days. But I do feel like I got to know Mike more than others. There was a crossover of interests. The fact he wrote about Wesley Willis about six months ago sums it up for me. In the late 90s, I used to ride around in my car with tears of laughter running down my face blasting the Alternative Tentacles’ musician singing such classics as:
- Rock n Roll McDonald’s
- I Wupped Batman’s Ass
- Cut the Mullet
So when Mike posted a new blog, or what was really a long form essay because he is above all a writer first and a damn good one, I was there for it.
Today, in a cross my fingers moment that he’d revived his site, not only was the 404 page gone, it was all gone. My web browser returned the error that the server couldn’t be found. Perhaps we’ll cross paths again one day on the Internet. It’s hard to say.
Blogs come and go, I’ve learned over the years. They live and they die; and sometimes, when the time is right, get reborn again one day from the ashes. Until then, see ya when I see ya Mike.
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