I’ve spent the last couple of nights just reading blogs. I haven’t had the energy to do much else, TV didn’t seem appealling, and I didn’t feel like reading a dead-trees book until I was about to fall asleep. So, I just started surfing.
After my informal but diligent survey of the past couple of evenings, a couple things become really obvious to me. First, there’s just a lot of good stuff out there. I mean a ton. I just kept finding myself getting lost, again and again, in reading about what people are doing and what they’re thinking. Some are really deep. Some seem shallow or trivial on the surface, but by reading enough posts, you begin to get the picture (if only by reading between the lines) that something’s really going on there. Dozens of little dramas being played out, even if over something that seems unimportant to someone not a direct participant. Hundreds of people creating. This is the good side of the web, the way I remeber things from years back, when it all first started. I was encouraged.
I also discovered that I have to be just about the most boring SOB around. I don’t live anywhere cool. I don’t do anything cool. I’m just, well, fucking boring.
I need to get a life. I used to have one, I swear. I must have misplaced it, somewhere. Actually, I think I just got tired. It takes a lot of energy to be that damn passionate all the time. I used to have crises, and angst-ridden nights, and even the occasional full-blown fit. Now, I just get pissed occasionally at people at work, and have periodic bouts of low-grade depression.
Is this what getting old, is? Gods, so many of you out there are so fired up. Where the hell did my passion go?
The other night, I found an old stack of Zip disks that turned out to have all of the backups of all of the work we did when I had my own web design business. Looking through those was an interesting experience. Shit mattered to me back then. Compared to what’s being produced today, hell compared to what I do myself today, those sites weren’t all that great. But damn, we poured our hearts and souls into them. What we were doing mattered.
My big accomplishment for today was making a logo. Woohoo.
Look if anybody finds what I did with my life, and with my passion, would you mail it back to me? I’ll even pay the shipping.
