It's awfully quiet around here, again

Around 6 years ago, I wrote my first post on this site, It’s awfully quiet around here. The site has gone through two major rewrites since then. I just overhauled it to use Ghost for the blogging backend, and it works great.

Well, shit.

I made the decision to switch to Ghost since I wanted to write not write a blogging framework. And now that it’s working I find myself at a bit of a loss for words.

It would be easiest to turn this into a technical blog. I could write about the process of using Ghost as a headless CMS. I could write about my attempt at making a Firebase clone—and why I scrapped the whole project. I could write yet another post about CORS and why it’s actually pretty cool, despite all the shade people cast on it.

It would be hardest to turn this into something more literary. I’d put my heart into it, and it would take a beating when I look at my stats section and see crickets. I’d hit my ceiling quicker, my lack of actually understanding grammar would be more noticeable, and I’d face criticism (mainly from myself).

So I’m falling back to what I’m good at: writing about lack of expression. It’s been a constant circular theme in my poetry since I was younger, I write about being unable to write, I write about fear of not writing. And it kind of scratches the itch of expression, but doesn’t say anything. See… I’m doing it again.

So, instead, let’s talk a bit about what this domain means to me: distant.land. Distant Land. There’s something deeply appealing to me about the far away. Seeing stars and thinking about how mindbogglingly distant and ancient they are—a distant land both in time and space. Reading novels—an even more distant land, fundamentally unreachable.

Why is this? I think it’s partially because I used to see the world around me as being steeped in a rich metaphysical reality, due to the way I was raised. Trees were dryads, merely sleeping. Then, as I grew older and drifted from my roots, trees became more complex, more alive, and more dead. Carbon, cells, part of a biological ecosystem. Deeply alive, but not a dryad. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus writes:

A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.

So, if I’m a stranger here, I must be more at home in a Distant Land.. right?

All that to say, while I will likely write technical blog posts as well, I think I’d rather write about something a bit closer to home. And a little bit further away.