Scan Arcana No 1

A bolt of lightning kerplow!ed me the other day when I realized that this year marks my little blog's fifth. Damnation, how stolen time can disappear just like... that. In some ways I'm grateful, so much has changed since then, including the whole posting regularly online thang. My approach to blogging was nothing then like it is now, more of an adjunct to keeping a handwritten journal, and you can see in early entries quick little thoughts and gripes, nothing like the masterpieces of composition and wit that grace zeitheist now. Yeah, right, but you know what I mean. Things change, and not always for the worst.

In recognition of a half decade of web logging... actually, that isn't entirely accurate. It's been longer than that. Back in the days of LiveJournal I was doing approximately the same kind of thing, and that was 2002-ish. Then there was posting to Myspace and a subsequent, abortive effort at fledgling site Blogger.com (bless their souls) that tried and died and fertilized the screen for what has become... zeitheist!

So for the purposes of marking a neat point of entry, and out of an innate fondness for the number, we're going to say it's been five years and leave it at that. The stuff prior was prelude, a rehearsal, apprenticeship, or whatever you want to call it.

Yeah, okay, way cool and all that, but weren't we talking about handmade journals?

Full disclosure: I am a nut for journaling. I've been doing it regularly, with varying degrees of failure, since the wee days of junior high. And before you get your lather up, fear not, none of those pages will appear here. I'm not that masochistic.

Anyhow, the point is that five years back I'd been at this idea for a good while of spilling ink in as miniscule a fashion as possible; the collage aspect came later, after I was out of school and living in Europe.

It was a boredom thing to start, or maybe plain old laziness. Rather than write out descriptions of things, I started finding images and taping them onto the page and writing around them. This developed as time went on and progressively more involved -to the point where I was doing equal parts collage and microscopic writing.

A school counselor once laid it on me that I'm a visual learner. All those drawings and font types I was doodling in my class notes were not the result of a wandering mind but of a learning style that takes in and retains information visually. Says her. Still, there must have been some truth to it. My "note-taking" has only grown the more elaborate, if not any more effective, since then.

What surprises me the most going back over these pages from 2005 is how obsessed with politics they are. Even my girlfriend of the time doesn't get as much attention as political events. I didn't have any love for the Bush administration or for most of the subjects being addressed, and my journal was a torrent of outrage and discontent at that mid-point of the naughties. Well, just another thing that's no longer the same -because you know I'm all about flowers and puppies now!

We've got some time yet until June marks the official anniversary, so expect more scannables from the venerable archive to show up here. You've been warned!