When time like the pyramids has worn away
All the mountains and the valleys of the words we say
We have got to make sure that something remains
If we lose each other, we’ve got no one to blame
— Oingo Boingo
Sitting at the computer on a Sunday night (as I have been most of the weekend), I was just thinking about why I do this and my other websites. I remember an essay by Andy Jenkins from an old issue of his Bend zine where he pondered the same thing. He finally came to the conclusion that if he counted all the amazing people he’d met from doing Bend, he had a pretty good idea of why he did it in the first place.
And it all comes back to that: connections with others. I’d have to say that’s at least half of the reason I do these things. The other half has something to do with documenting the days as opposed to just letting them pass by without so much notice. Put the two together and you’ve got enough justification to cover all-night driving sessions, alcohol-soaked conversations, mid-afternoon headaches, screaming and stilted interactions, hints passed and received, plans made, broken, then fulfilled, words twisted beyond recognition, and sleep deprivation of all kinds.
There’s a quote that Douglas Coupland slipped into the marginalia of his novel Microserfs that haunts me to no end: “We generate stories for you because you don’t save the ones that are yours” (p. 349). I took it as a taunt, and I refuse to not save the stories that are mine.
That’s why I do what I do: to foster and maintain connections with others and to document those connections.