The Once and Future Blog

When I went on a blogging hiatus back in December, I called this “The Once And Future Blog” and I took a lot of the old content offline.

I guess it’s the future.  The other day someone was talking about swine flu and I only vaguely remembered my own paranoia (or caution) about it last year.  As in a few months ago.  How quickly I forget about these things.  It’s ridiculous.

The old stuff is staying offline, maybe forever.  I’m not sure.  I do know that I continue to focus on fiction and that I’ll also be having some essays published around the web soon.  But I still like this idea of a “Once And Future” blog, probably because I  like thinking about the past and the future, and because, inevitably, we all end up coming back to these old ghosts.

On another level, Once and Future has a lot to do with writing.  “This thing I wrote based on this thing that happened somewhere is going to be published at some point in the future at this or that place” or “this thing I thought about religion or love or God or economics or myself turns out a little different because all of the sudden this other thing.”

Theologians talk about “ancient-future” modes of worship, biocentrists speculate about the courses of the indestructible energy powering consciousness, astrophysicists talk about expanding and retracting universes, my son and I are fascinated — fascinated — by dinosaurs, and I imagine a world where his kids or grandkids live on the moon or a terraformed Mars.  I like to think that the past and the future both belong to our story.

And so I consume tech blogs and social media and news and write stories about the Pennsylvania rust belt and hope we figure out ways to keep all of this going.  But, you know, better.