"Moose Out Front Shoulda Told Ya..."
What Would I Say To You Now?
Over the past six months, I've undergone some pretty drastic changes. I've moved to a new city, started a new and totally unfamiliar job, and began in earnest the process of trying to piece together what exactly this crazy life of mine is going to look like.
As time has gone on, I've had to make some pretty important decisions regarding what things will stay in my life and what will be jettisoned. It's a process that I took on with trepidation but am now pleased to say has turned out remarkably well. For the first time in a really long time, I'm happy with things. It's not all looking exactly like I wished it would, but I am legitimately and seriously happy.
Back when I first started A Rapturous Verbatim--a blog whose title has, I've come to realize, been laughably ironic--I was not so much on the happy side. I was in the midst of my junior year at Princeton, and things were beginning to get a bit on the dicey side with the onset of my independent work. (I never did regale my faithful audience with the story of how I got the nickname "Fastest Thesis in the West," did I? Another time, perhaps.) I wasn't doing anything creative, and I wanted to have something just for me, something I could enjoy and create.
And, if you'll recall, in my very first post, I made what in hindsight is a stunning declaration:I can't promise everything that ends up here will be polished or even fun to read. I can't promise that my ranting will go anywhere, that any ideas I come up with will ever come to fruition, or that anything I write here will make any sense.
How about that, huh?
It's funny the way things turn out. Before too long, I'd begun treating ARV like a clearinghouse for my most profound and well-reasoned ideas. It was a place to go to do seriously, thoughtful writing. It was an opportunity for me to take an idea and draw it out to its fullest without feeling the obligations of academic discourse.
It was also, ultimately, depressing as hell.
If you look back, you'll notice that within the first couple of months, I wrote not one but two posts declaring fresh starts. (That's right. Two fresh starts in the first four months. A real winner I had on my hands.) And even worse than that, most of the material in there was simply me bitching about how I haven't done enough writing lately.
As it turns out, that's still a legit problem. But over the last four years, I've discovered that whining about your problems doesn't actually, you know, fix them.
Fortunately for my faithful reading audience--and really, you guys are troopers--I figured all this out a couple of years ago. And so my response was to start up a new blog, one that would allow me to be a little lighter, more amusing, less polished (again), and more off-the-cuff. I launched A Tournament of Lies thinking that the two blogs would play off of each other but develop organically. I'd originally envisioned 1-2 posts per week on ARV and 3-4 posts per week (if not more) on AToL. I'd figured on it being a good way to showcase the two sides of my personality.
But, as I've said a few times already, things changed. Things have been changing. And to quote an old song by Mary-Chapin Carpenter (born in Princeton, no less!), "The old way isn't working anymore." As I've become less, shall we say, miserable, I've been neglecting ARV. (Or populating it with mostly book reviews, which it turns out not everyone digs.) All because I felt the blog had pigeonholed itself into a particular voice or style. And while my early AToL posts were fresh and funny, I've been noticing the same things happening over there lately too.
The straw came with my two latest AToL posts. I started by telling what I thought was a silly story--the kind of thing I'd originally intended the blog to do--but I realized that the story was getting more out of hand than I'd expected, for two reasons: a) it was running far longer than I thought it would (I do have a tendency to do that...), and b) it was less silly funny than sardonically funny, way darker than it seemed when I conceived the idea of writing it down (I tend to do that too, actually...).
Don't get me wrong: I think the story was totally worth sharing. But it didn't seem to fit the venue. It was too funny to be posted on ARV, and too dark to be posted on AToL.
Well damn it, now what?
My solution in the past had been to create a new blog, but we see how well that's worked out. I've run into the same problem again, where my style and tone have shifted so much that the things I'm writing don't seem to fit the molds that have been defined by what came before. It felt, I realized, like when I decided that it was time to abandon my old childish, immature Xanga from high school (which is still hanging around there somewhere on the Internet, if you go dig it out) in favor of what I perceived would be a fresh, mature perspective.
And now, dear readers, that time has come again.
I've come to the conclusion that A Rapturous Verbatim and A Tournament of Lies, fascinating and not-totally-ill-advised experiments that they were, have run their life spans to the end. After just over 100 posts on each, I just don't see how I can, in my present state, sustain these two blogs anymore and have them function the way I'd planned--or, rather, the way they've turned out. So the time has come to shut the door for good.
With the exception of one last forthcoming post, this will be the final entry posted on either of these two blogs.
Rest assured that I'm not dropping out of the blogging game. I've been hard at work over the past few days crafting the beginnings of a new, stripped-down project, one that I hope will better reflect me and my daily life and the things I want to write down and share with the world. My goal is to have it be devoid of the kind of defining characteristics that ended up strangling these two blogs as the years have gone on. But time will tell, I suppose.
So really, I'm seeing this as nothing more than the beginning of a new chapter. I have no intentions of taking down the blogs, since I feel strongly about keeping them intact as a landmark of a very specific period of my life. But the fact is, that period is over, and the time has come to move on and start fresh. There's more to say, just nothing more to say here.
Full details will be posted here when the new project is ready for primetime. Until then, thanks for indulging me around these parts for the past few years, and I hope you'll follow along to the new joint and keep up with things.
What would I say to you now? You'll just have to wait and find out.
