My Imminent Demise and Abrupt Return

Several months ago, I began to write my last ever OpenDiary post. This was to be the closing post of this journal, and with this being my third failed attempt at being an OpenDiarist, also the last time I would bother trying to make this work – ergo, my last post ever. It began as follows:-

This OpenDiary thing just isn’t working.

I don’t know why I thought it would. Like somehow my presence here, after all these years, would magically stir up a legion of adoring fans ready to wait breathlessly on my every word. That was just sheer idiocy, really. Maybe when I saw some familiar names around, I thought that maybe that would be enough. But I should have paid closer attention to the dates – those diaries are long dead. As, perhaps, I should have left this one.

I just watched "The Family Man", with Nicholas Cage. I swear, that movie depresses the shit out me every time I see it. And not in an "omg that’s so sweet I’m getting tears!" chick flick kind of way. More in a "I can relate to this movie so much it makes me physically sore inside" kind of way.

A lot of people can probably relate to the movie’s concept. What if you’d chosen the other path. Family, instead of career. Career, instead of family. Love, or money? 99% of people in the civilized western world have picked one path or the other and probably wondered what their life may have turned out like if they’d chosen the other side.

But it hits me twice as hard, because somehow in my life, I managed to choose neither, and no suitable option C either. And days like this, I find myself wondering how I managed that.

I’m approaching 30. I’m certainly not old yet, but I’m not extremely young, either. Many people my age are already very successful in their careers, or very settled with their families by now. My parents were already married and had given birth to me by the time they were my age. I know several people my age who are married now, many with kids, mortgages… working their way to suburban utopia in neighborhoods of picket fences and golden retrievers… I know many others whose careers are really taking off, they’re buying land, making investments, planning their first few million dollars… scaling their way, either via the corporate ladder or independent entrepreneurialism, to a life of financial freedom…

But me, somehow, I left myself out. I want to say "I got left out", but that implies a sense of victimhood I don’t feel. I feel that I’ve make a choice, or a series of choices, somewhere along the line, that have brought me to this point. A point where I have no family, nor the beginnings of one (a romantic relationship, a partner – even a social circle which could lead to these things), nor a career, or the beginnings of one (qualifications, skills, some form of reliable employment and/or income)… some people choose "the road less traveled", for their lives, but I seem to have chosen to cut off the track into the wilderness, walk for about an hour until I know I couldn’t get back to the road if I tried, and then sat down and declared that to be my destination….

Something interrupted my ability to complete that post in one sitting, so I cut’n’pasted it to a sticky note on my desktop. And there it sat, rolled up and innocuous there on my computer screen, just a little bar with the words "OpenDiary – TBC" on it, serving to remind me that the little virtual note contained this epic "final post" to be continued when I available time and available motivation happened to coincide for me. Not surprisingly for me, that just didn’t happen. Christmas went by uneventfully, New Years Eve was barely a blip on my radar. Valentines Day was duly noted as the anniversary of my being single and celibate for three years now, which I noted with a shrug. Life plodded dully on, and admittedly, I had time in spades but precious little motivation to complete that post.

So finally, four months later, I decide it’s time to come back and euthanize my OpenDiary account. What do I find, but a slew of notes (okay, so there were five, but I’m easily pleased!) from readers asking me to stick with it. Including, to my delight, notes from two of my oldest OpenDiary favorites – the two I’d assumed had in fact abandoned their diaries themselves, and would never read the notes I’d left them. I was, for once, pleased to be wrong.

So, maybe there’s hope for me yet. If even five people give enough of a shit to read my ramblings and once in a while say "Hey, I was here!", it would keep me writing. Writing what, I don’t know, but writing, nonetheless. And that’s what I want to be doing.

That said, for those of you who don’t really know me yet, I’ve never been a "blogger". I can’t be one of those diarists that posts every day inanely cataloging the mundane events of their dreary life:-

"lolz so today i got up and went to make my brekfast rite, but i opened the fridge and there was no milk so i was like wtf?! so i yelled at my mom and she said if i wanted milk i should go buy sum so i wuz just like lol sif!!! so i checked my emailz and there were like 2 from brad and i was just like wtf, i sent u like 6 and u only send 2 back, what gives?! so i wrote him back….."

Yech, somebody jam a spork into my eye, please.

Anyhow, sadly, even if I were to write like that, that hasty example would be a thrilling saga compared to my average day, which mainly consists of eating, sleeping, using this computer in some way, or various combinations of those. So, you won’t find me updating this journal daily with a banal commentary of these same tedious events, interspersed with bad grammar and popular chat room acronyms. Perhaps I’ll do one post recounting my average day, just to make my point, sans the chatspeak, but beyond that, no, you won’t be seeing that from me.

Anyhow, this brings me to one of the two biggest problems I have with writing things online. The first problem, as I mentioned above, is being noticed. I know a lot of diarists and bloggers prefer, or at least claim to prefer, to write only for themselves, and not for whoever might be reading. Me, I write for the attention. My theory is, if I’m going to write something and post it on the internet, and nobody ever reads it (or perhaps they do, but nobody ever comments or offers feedback, hence I never know they’ve read it, which amounts to the same thing), then for all intensive purposes, I might as well just have written those same words to a text file on my PC and saved it to my hard drive. And considering that I know I’d never have any cause to open that file again and read over my own words, I may as well just not keep it, but delete the file once I’ve written it. And from there, I figure that if I’m just going to erase the words, I might as well save myself the trouble and simply not write them to begin with. Are you still with me?

My point is, I believe that one writes on a public medium like the internet, to be read. And to be commented on. If I didn’t want feedback, I wouldn’t post my writing on a public medium like OpenDiary. So if you’re reading this, for the love of God, spare myegotistical sanity and leave a comment!

But that’s only problem #1. The second, and arguably more serious problem, is sheer lack of content. I mean, my life is dull. And I don’t mean in a workaday, rat race, same office politics, same family arguments, same school hassles kind of way that most people think their lives are dull. I mean, dull in a way that 99% of you couldn’t even begin to comprehend – a life with almost no human contact, no movement, no sights, no sounds. Imagine yourself in a padded cell, with a computer and a TV and a small fridge full of food. If you can, you’re getting close to a picture of how dull my life is. And even the most talented writer can’t turn that into a gripping saga, unless they have powerful hallucinogenic narcotics available to them.

This is something that has been a roadblock to me writing online my whole life. In October 2000, I discovered OpenDiary and began the only semi-successful online journal I’ve ever had. I met some of the greatest online people I’ve ever known through this site, and spent two years sharing my memories and making new ones. But back then, OpenDiary was a writer’s nightmare, technically speaking. It had about a 6,000 character per entry limit, one which I’d almost always break, resulting in countless multi-part posts. The site would crash constantly, downtime was prolific, and some days when you just had to get something off your chest, the website wouldn’t load at all. Then, suddenly they announced the great new OpenDiary Plus, where for a small fee, you could have many great features. I, for one, smelled and promptly announced the conspiracy from day one which proved to be true – despite promising that the original OpenDiary (then renamed Free OpenDiary) would remain a fully active separate site operating alongside the pay site, I was smugly but unhappily proved correct when they announced that "Free OpenDiary" would be shut down and the OpenDiary Plus project would remain a subscription fee powered site henceforth. In righteous disgust, I said my goodbyes and shut down my diary. I was already unhappy with OpenDiary, and I certainly wasn’t going to pay for something that I already hated for free. So in March 2002, I shut down my first online journal.

By January of 2003, it would seem that the owners of OpenDiary must have realized their error. Clearly their attempt to capitalize on the project did not meet their expectations, and far fewer members were willing to pay with their cash than they’d hoped, particularly what with countless competing online journal or "blog" websites becoming popular and remaining free. So when, on a whim, I decided to look in on OD and see what had changed, and discovering that OpenDiary was free once more, I decided to take a second crack at online journalism. "Revenge of Venomous" was born.

Even by my very first entry, memories of why I left OpenDiary were presented to me in all their gory glory. 500 Server Errors, failed posts, server timeouts, and all this before I’d even written a hundred words. On top of that, my veritable legion of readers was long gone. Either migrated to OD+ or quit in disgust as I had, very few of the fans of my original diary ever noted my return. My second attempt at being an OpenDiarist lasted less than a dozen posts.

At the time, I’d fallen in with a crowd who were all chronic LiveJournal addicts. They swore by that site as the only place worth writing at, and eventually convinced me to give it a try. Grudgingly, and cynically, I entered the world of LiveJournal, and found it to be a disturbingly different world to the OpenDiary I was used to. I couldn’t begin to count the differences – it would be like explaining the difference between the texture of a piece of bread or an apple in your mouth. Technically one talented with words could do it, but by no means easily. I will stick with this ever eloquent explanation: "very, very different!". =)

But, I stuck with it. I’d moved interstate and suddenly become very social in real life, something I’d not been since my teenage years, and almost all of my new friends were religious LiveJournalists. For them, it was not only a place to blog and babble and rant and whine and vent, but also their primary place of contact, communication, and planning. Many a social gathering I missed in the early days only to hear "What do you mean you weren’t invited? I posted the details all over my LiveJournal!". I quickly found out that if one didn’t at least try to keep up with the updates of their friends journals at least once a day, one was left behind socially, not just online, but offline as well. And many of these people blogspammed not just daily, but sometimes up to eight times a day. Sometimes a post would just be a random photo, or a few words, or a message to a friend, or a randomly inane movie quote. Sometimes they would just say "Bleh." with a sour mood icon. But one had to wade through all this mind-numbing crap to not miss the important things. And as time went on, I found my own journal becoming less and less about sharing my thoughts with the world, and more just an online day planner like all the others.

Additionally, as a side note, I found LiveJournal to be an extremely insular community. Nobody ever read or noted you unless they knew you. Occasionally, a "friend of a friend" might note you after seeing you note your mutual friend, but that was rare. Unlike here at OpenDiary, you couldn’t just start with nothing and slowly rely on people to find you, and if they liked what they read, favorite you and continue to read you. That, in the end, was half of what soured me on LiveJournal. As I said above, I write to be read, and noticed. And not just by the same two polite real life friends who comment just because they know I want them to. I need people to say "Hey man, I read this entry to the end, and wanted to say {anything}!".

So, as I began dismantling my ties to that social circle in the real world, and moving back home from my two year vacation interstate, in July of ’04 I shut down my LiveJournal along with that part of my life, well and truly burning all of my bridges in the process with a long and impassioned "Fuck you all!" speech to go out with a bang. In April of ’06, I went through a big internet spring cleaning phase, and went back and deleted the long-dormant LiveJournal account, along with accounts of various kinds I had on many other websites.

After that, as you no doubt know if you’re reading this, I lasted less than a year before the need to be heard came barking at my door again. I resolved to give OpenDiary one last good hard shot, being that it was my first and most enjoyable online journal ever, and if that failed me, give up this online journal bullshit once and for all. And it very nearly came to that, until the trickle of belated notes came in. But now, there’s hope yet…

This is one long entry. I see below this fancy new text box, that the character length is now 30,000 characters. This gives me hope for my continued OD usage – so far this immense entry isn’t even half that,but in the old days of OD, it would already be a three part post.

There’s another very large, and very important key element to my past, present and future attempts at online journaling, but since I left it out of its chronological place in the story, I’ll go the extra mile and leave it for my next post, too. For now, I’d just like to know – did anybody read this far? Is anybody still with me here? Does anybody care? =)

You know what to do if you do…. =)